Oral Answers to Questions

NORTHERN IRELAND

The Secretary of State was asked—

Provisional IRA Army Council

William McCrea: What progress has been made with the dismantling of the command structure of the IRA, with particular reference to the Provisional IRA army council.

Peter Hain: If I may, I should like to congratulate the right hon. Members for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson) and for Lagan Valley (Mr. Donaldson) on being nominated to be Privy Councillors; those nominations are well deserved.
	Successive Independent Monitoring Commission reports have demonstrated that the Provisional IRA is committed to a political path. The IMC's latest report reiterates that the organisation has eschewed violence and disbanded its paramilitary structures.

William McCrea: Having announced membership of the Provisional IRA army council in the past, can the Secretary of State tell the House who is in membership of that terrorist body now? Does he understand that the Unionist community will have no confidence in the words of Adams and McGuinness while the so-called army terrorist council of the IRA remains in existence as a threat to the stability of Northern Ireland? There can be no riding of two horses, and all terrorist structures must therefore be dismantled now.

Peter Hain: I agree that there can be no riding of two horses. I am encouraged by the fact that successive reports by the IMC have confirmed that the engineering, intelligence gathering and other paramilitary apparatus of the IRA has been disbanded. That is not me speaking as Secretary of State; it is the IMC. That is the big picture, and the complete transformation that we have seen in Northern Ireland in recent weeks underpins the commitment that the IMC has reported.

Eddie McGrady: Does the Secretary of State agree that none of the paramilitary organisations—republican dissident or loyalist—now has a mandate or authority in Northern Ireland? Will he ensure, however, that they cease activities such as exercising control over communities under the guise of community groups or restorative justice groups? Will he give direction and guidance to ensure that such activities do not go on, and that no Government funding is paid to groups that contain erstwhile paramilitaries?

Peter Hain: I agree completely that there is no role for paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland, if there ever was. There is certainly no justification for any of the trappings of paramilitary activity, let alone the activity itself. We continue to work as a Government to ensure that loyalist groups, in particular, come out of their past of violence, paramilitary activity and criminality—which is even more of a problem and has been for many years—and move towards accepting the rule of law without any qualification.

Gregory Campbell: The Secretary of State has alluded to the progress being made towards normality, and that is indeed welcome. A number of issues remain outstanding, however, the most glaring of which is the existence of the IRA army council. What pressure is he applying to the hon. Members for Belfast, West (Mr. Adams) and for Mid-Ulster (Mr. McGuinness) to dismantle and get rid of that anachronism in Northern Ireland in 2007?

Peter Hain: I say to the hon. Gentleman, as I said to the hon. Member for South Antrim (Dr. McCrea), that the important thing is that the IRA has now turned its back irrevocably on its past. The apparatus that once existed for terror and paramilitary violence has all disappeared, not least due to the pressure that the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues have maintained so steadfastly over these past few years. That is the important thing.

Patrick Cormack: Obviously, I agree with the right hon. Gentleman's last comment, but I should like to refer to the earlier comment by the hon. Member for south Armagh— [ Interruption. ] I am so sorry, I meant the hon. Member for South Down (Mr. McGrady). The Secretary of State will be aware that the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs produced a report on community restorative justice that drew attention to the very points that the hon. Gentleman raised. It is crucial that there should be no back door into these schemes for people who have not utterly and totally repudiated their paramilitary past.

Peter Hain: As the hon. Gentleman will know, the Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Bill, which has just gone through Parliament, has quite properly strengthened the oversight of community restorative justice schemes. His own Select Committee commented on that, and we have taken careful note of those comments and implemented the points that were made. It is now absolutely clear that anyone involved in community restorative justice has to obey the rule of law—there is no qualification on that—and has to work with the police; there is no qualification on that either.

David Lidington: Like the Secretary of State, I welcome the profound change that has taken place in the republican movement during recent years. Does he agree, however, that that very process of change means that the existence of something calling itself an army council—and that council's continuing assertion of a claim to legitimate authority within the island of Ireland—is at odds with the transformation that the Sinn Fein leadership says that it has brought about, and with the pledge of office that Sinn Fein Ministers have taken? Surely the best way for Sinn Fein to demonstrate to the most sceptical Unionists that its commitment to democracy is really serious would be to get rid of that anachronistic institution.

Peter Hain: I share the hon. Gentleman's objective. Obviously we all look forward to a time when—as the situation continues to stabilise and the transformation deepens—there are no remnants of, and no legacy from, any of the paramilitary past that has bedevilled the people of Northern Ireland and, indeed, the whole island of Ireland, and that goes for every paramilitary organisation.

David Lidington: Members on both sides of the House hope to see conditions make the devolution of criminal justice and policing possible, in perhaps as little as 12 months from now. Does the Secretary of State believe that for such devolution to take place we need first to reach a stage at which the British and Irish Governments feel that the Provisional IRA is no longer a terrorist threat and that, as a consequence, proscription should cease?

Peter Hain: Let us take one step at a time. The Assembly has a duty, under legislation that the hon. Gentleman supported, to report to the Secretary of State by 27 March next year on the prospects for devolution of policing and justice being completed by May next year, as the Government intend and as was set out on the Anglo-Irish agreement. We shall have to see what assessment is made and how matters progress, but as I said earlier, the IMC has stated repeatedly—I know the hon. Gentleman accepts this, and he is nodding—that the Provisional IRA poses no terrorist threat, and indeed is not capable of doing so.

Loyalist Paramilitary Organisations

Andrew MacKay: What recent discussions he has had with the representatives of loyalist paramilitary organisations in Northern Ireland on the decommissioning of their weapons.

Paul Goggins: Ministers continue their engagement with the Ulster Political Research Group and the Progressive Unionist party in support of their efforts to encourage loyalist paramilitaries to leave conflict behind and adhere to democratic principles.

Andrew MacKay: While I welcome the news that the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Red Hand Commandos are saying that they will now decommission their arms, is it not still of great concern that the Ulster Defence Association has not done the same? All three organisations are involved in criminality, drug dealing, extortion and loan sharking. Will the Minister give an undertaking that action will continue to be taken against them when they have committed crimes?

Paul Goggins: The UVF's announcement was a welcome step forward. Of course we want to see full and verifiable decommissioning, and last week's discussions with General de Chastelain and representatives of the UVF were another welcome step. However, the right hon. Gentleman is right to say that we cannot tolerate either paramilitary activity or criminality by either of those organisations, and I assure him, and the House, that law enforcement in Northern Ireland will continue to bear down on them.

Peter Robinson: I join the Minister in welcoming the UVF's statement of the first steps towards a complete winding down of its organisation. However, he and the House will recognise that it fell short in decommissioning terms by only putting weapons "beyond reach"—beyond whose reach is not clear. Can the Minister inject some urgency into the issue, and indeed into the issue of the disbanding of the army council of the IRA? It is essential that all paramilitary organisations go completely out of business, and are seen to be doing so.

Paul Goggins: I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that there must be a sense of urgency in relation to any organisation or individual still involved in paramilitary activity. I hope that those on either the dissident republican or the loyalist side who are still engaged in paramilitary activity will recognise what a fruitless waste the violence and conflict of the past 40 years has been, will see the hope that democracy is bringing to Northern Ireland, and will desist from their activities and join the peace process in a meaningful way.

Laurence Robertson: May I echo my right hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Mr. Mackay), and say how important it is for all loyalist paramilitary organisations to decommission? Indeed, as was said by the right hon. Member for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson), the weapons must be destroyed and verification must take place. The Minister slightly pre-empted my question by referring to de Chastelain, but could he give a little more detail about the engagement that has taken place between the so-called loyalist paramilitary forces and the general?

Paul Goggins: The hon. Gentleman will understand that Ministers are not privy to the detailed discussions that take place with the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, which is headed by General de Chastelain. The general has had that meeting, however, and I hope that it will lead to a new phase in which the UVF engages meaningfully with the IICD, decommissioning becomes verifiable, and we have not only the promise that weapons are beyond use but confirmation that they are.

Wildlife Protection

Peter Bottomley: What recent discussions he has had at a European level on the protection of winter quarters of whooper swans potentially affected by road proposals.

Maria Eagle: Following the restoration of devolution on 8 May, I can now tell the hon. Gentleman that roads are now devolved, and whooper swans are devolved too. The hon. Gentleman asks about recent discussions at European level; as a Liverpool MP, the only discussions that I am really interested in having at European level today are about Liver birds rather than whooper swans—and specifically about how well the Reds will do in Athens tonight.

Peter Bottomley: I am grateful to the Minister for her answer, and also for a written answer from one of her colleagues on 20 March revealing that in the Seamus Heaney area of special protection, where a large proportion of the 4,000 over-wintering whooper swans are to be found, by Lough Beg, there is a proposal for a dual carriageway from Toome to Castledawson.
	Am I right in saying that both national and international laws require the Roads Service to make a far better assessment of the risk to whooper swans—and may I invite the Minister to come with me next winter to see them and to make sure that they are protected?

Maria Eagle: I can confirm that whooper swans are protected. They are listed in annexe 2 to the birds directive and schedule 1 to the Wildlife (Northern Ireland) Order 1985. However, such matters are the concern of the devolved Administration. The Minister in the Northern Ireland Administration with responsibility for them is Arlene Foster MLA. I am aware of the hon. Gentleman's previous correspondence, and he might wish to write further to her on this matter.

Prisoners (Drugs Rehabilitation)

Lady Hermon: If he will make a statement on the drugs rehabilitation strategy for prisoners in Northern Ireland.

Paul Goggins: The Northern Ireland Prison Service recently concluded a wide-ranging consultation on its substance misuse policy. Voluntary organisations currently provide counselling and rehabilitation courses in each of its establishments. A full-time addiction services manager takes up post on 1 June.

Lady Hermon: I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. However, will he kindly explain what is so exceptional about the drugs rehabilitation of prisoners that responsibility for it alone was not transferred properly and on time in April to the Health, Social Services and Public Safety Department?

Paul Goggins: Discussions continue between the Department and the Prison Service about the detail of the new arrangements. It is important that the health service in prisons is run by health experts; I am committed to that. The hon. Lady points to the fact that three voluntary organisations provide community addiction services in the three prisons in Northern Ireland. They do so effectively, and I know that she has a particular interest in the Northlands project, which provides an excellent service. I am looking at possible ways to expand such services, to the benefit of prisoners who as a result can come out of prison free of their addiction.

Jeffrey M Donaldson: I thank the Secretary of State for his earlier words of congratulation. Many prisoners who enter prisons in Northern Ireland—some 10 per cent.—have amphetamine- based addictions, so rehabilitation work is clearly necessary, and we should enhance that. However, is it not the case that many drug prevention groups that work outside prisons trying to prevent young people from becoming addicted to drugs in the first place are operating on a shoestring budget? Ascert, in my constituency, is doing good work, but it cannot get funding. Do we not need to address the root cause of this problem by supporting groups that are trying to prevent it from happening in the first place?

Paul Goggins: I strongly agree with the right hon. Gentleman that prevention is always better than cure. A range of organisations throughout Northern Ireland are trying to prevent people from becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol in the first place. It is essential that when prisoners leave prison and go back into the community they receive the effective support that such groups offer.

Dissident Republican Organisations

Andrew Rosindell: What his assessment is of the terrorist threat posed by dissident Irish republican organisations.

Paul Goggins: While dissident republicans remain determined to cause harm and destruction, excellent policing continues to thwart them. Dissidents will not deter us, or the new Executive, from achieving a stable and prosperous future for Northern Ireland.

Andrew Rosindell: I thank the Minister for that reply. Although we are glad that power sharing has returned to Northern Ireland—and many of the terrorist organisations are now disarming—there are still dissident forces, such as Continuity IRA. What measures are the Government taking to prevent, dissuade and capture those vile and murderous criminals?

Paul Goggins: The Police Service of Northern Ireland takes the lead in detecting and preventing terrorist activities by organisations such as the one that the hon. Gentleman mentioned. So far this calendar year there have been 31 incidents involving dissident republican organisations. As recently as April, a serious incident was prevented in Lurgan by the PSNI, by a timely interception of what would have been a serious mortar attack. We should all compliment the PSNI on the work that it is doing and make it clear to those involved in dissident republican organisations, and loyalist paramilitary groups, that law enforcement will continue to hunt them and bear down on them.

David Simpson: The Secretary of State will be aware of a number of recent arrests in the Province—those of Brian Arthurs and two of his comrades, and of Roisin McAliskey, commonly known throughout the Province as members of the Provisional IRA. Can the Minister give us some background to the situation and assure us that if a request is made by the German authorities for the extradition of Roisin McAliskey, it will be accommodated?

Paul Goggins: The last question is entirely a matter for the German authorities under the European arrest warrant system. There will be arrests from time to time. The whole thrust of my argument is that the PSNI will continue to bear down on those involved in criminality or paramilitary activity. We should all be encouraged by the fact that Sinn Fein has made it clear that people should co-operate with the police whenever such arrests take place.

Security Situation

Henry Bellingham: What recent assessment he has made of the security situation in Northern Ireland; and if he will make a statement.

Peter Hain: The security situation continues to improve beyond recognition, as last month's report from the Independent Monitoring Commission made clear. But the report also shows that more is still needed from loyalist paramilitary groups to demonstrate their commitment to peace, and that dissident republicans continue to present a security threat.

Henry Bellingham: Further to the question asked by the hon. Member for South Antrim (Dr. McCrea), does the Minister agree that with the Provisional IRA army council in place, the IRA has a ready-made infrastructure to rebuild a terrorist capability rapidly at any time? Now that Sinn Fein is in government, surely the time has come for it finally to sever any links with its sister organisation the IRA? Otherwise, how can the Ulster public have real confidence in Sinn Fein Ministers?

Peter Hain: I have dealt with those matters in detail before.

Lembit �pik: With the normalisation of the security situationand, we hope, the eventual delegation of full powers to the Welsh Assemblyis it not time to think about merging the Northern Ireland Office into an office for the nations and regions, providing a logical structure for administering the nations of the United Kingdom and the regions of England?

Peter Hain: The House will note the hon. Gentleman's representations, but there has been all sorts of speculation about that and I do not intend to pursue it.

Loyalist Paramilitary Organisations

Alasdair McDonnell: What progress has been made on loyalist decommissioning in Northern Ireland; and if he will make a statement.

Paul Goggins: The recent meeting between the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning is a step in the right direction. It is vital that all loyalist paramilitary groups make a complete transition to peace and engage in full decommissioning.

Alasdair McDonnell: Is the Minister aware that people want an end to all paramilitary activityall the guns, intimidation, drug dealing, protection rackets and other threats to emerging normalityand is he also aware that while some elements within loyalism are making progress, people feel that he is only playing footsie with some hardliners who have no intention of ending their grip of fear on their local communities?

Paul Goggins: Of course my hon. Friend is right to say that we must continue to bear down on criminality and paramilitary activity. As I said in answer to an earlier question, my hope is that those involved in dissident republican groups and loyalist paramilitary organisations will see the wastefulness of the death and destruction of the last 40 years, and the positive hope that comes with democracy. Of course there will still be some hardliners, and they need to hear the message that we will not give up pursuing them and ensuring that if they do commit criminal acts, they are dealt with by the justice system.

Political Situation

Nigel Dodds: What recent assessment he has made of the political situation in Northern Ireland.

Peter Hain: We are all very encouraged by the positive start to devolution, and I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman, his party colleagues and the other parties for the strong leadership that everyone has shown.

Nigel Dodds: I thank the Secretary of State for his comments. However, does he accept that to bed in political progress and stability in Northern Ireland, it is absolutely essential that the right economic and financial package, which was promised to the people of Northern Ireland, is put in place?
	I welcome the presence of the Chancellor during these questions and his input into the work of progressing the economic package. I also welcome the fact that Sir David Varney is starting work on the corporation tax review this week. Can the Secretary of State assure us that progress will be made towards ensuring that a step change in the Northern Ireland economy can be made, moving forward, so that we can make real political and economic progress for Northern Ireland?

Peter Hain: Yes, I can [Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker: Order. The House needs to come to order. This noise is unfair to those who want to hear Northern Ireland questions.

Peter Hain: The Chancellor has been equally concerned to make sure that the incoming Executive, of which the hon. Gentleman is a member, have the best possible start and the best possible financial platform to succeed. That will be the case; any final details will be settled, and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will be satisfied.

Historic Inquiries

Sammy Wilson: How much has been allocated to the Police Service of Northern Ireland in 2007-08 for historical inquiries.

Paul Goggins: The historic inquiries team project has been allocated 34 million to re-examine all the unresolved deaths in Northern Ireland that were related to the security situation during the period from 1968 until the signing of the Belfast agreement.

Sammy Wilson: Is the Minister aware that up to 40 per cent. of police resources available for investigating serious crime can be diverted into historic inquiries, many of which originate from the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, which many believe is engaged in a witch hunt against former members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary? Does the Minister agree with the Superintendents Association of Northern Ireland, which says that perhaps now is the time to draw a line under the past and concentrate police resources on current policing needs, rather than on those politically motivated inquiries?

Paul Goggins: It is very important that the historic inquiries team should be able to fulfil the purpose for which it was first established: to look back at records and see whether explanations for unresolved deaths can be offered to families. However, I strongly agree with the hon. Gentleman that we need to find other ways of drawing a line under the pastnot to pretend that the past did not happen or that the hurt is not still there, but to focus our resources on the present and the future so that, going forward, Northern Ireland can enjoy peace and prosperity.

Organised Crime

Nicholas Winterton: What plans he has to improve the effectiveness of policies to deal with organised crime in Northern Ireland.

Paul Goggins: The multi-agency Organised Crime Task Force enables Government, law enforcement agencies and business to tackle organised crime in a co-ordinated, effective and strategic way. Next month, I shall publish the latest OCTF annual report and threat assessment.

Nicholas Winterton: I am grateful to the Minister for that considered and rational reply, but is there not a danger that acts of terrorism, which have dominated Northern Ireland in recent decades, could well be replaced by crimes committed by organisations? That would undermine the peace and stability that have recently come to Northern Ireland.

Paul Goggins: The hon. Gentleman is right; we know of the connection between organised criminality and those who in the past may have been involved in paramilitary activity. However, I assure the hon. Gentleman that the Organised Crime Task Force brings all those agencies together to defeat those involved in organised crime. Indeed, yesterday I chaired a meeting of the Organised Crime Task Force stakeholder group, which brings business and law enforcement groups together. We will deal with organised crime, in order to eradicate it from Northern Ireland.

Provisional IRA Army Council

Gregory Campbell: What further progress is being made in the dismantling of paramilitary structures in Northern Ireland, with particular reference to the Provisional IRA army council.

Peter Hain: I refer the hon. Gentleman to the answer I gave earlier to the hon. Member for South Antrim (Dr. McCrea)and to him, too, I think.

Gregory Campbell: I thank the Secretary of State for the improving security situation, to which he has now referred twice. Can he ensure not only that the improvement continues, but that we systematically try to purge Northern Ireland society of all aspects of paramilitary activity?

Peter Hain: Yes, indeed. I can certainly give the hon. Gentleman that assurance. We are determined that all remnants of paramilitary activity, especially by dissident republicans and loyalists, must be put aside and that everybody must turn their back on that activity, so that Northern Ireland can move forward to a confident, peaceful and democratic future under a devolved Government.

PRIME MINISTER

The Prime Minister was asked

Millennium Development Goals

Andrew George: What progress he will report to the forthcoming EU and G8 summits in respect of commitments to the millennium development goals.

Tony Blair: We are making progress on the commitments to the millennium development goals, particularly in respect of the commitment to halve the world's population living in poverty, on which we are making significant progress. In respect of HIV/AIDS, we believe that we will have near universal access by 2010. In respect of primary education, there is a big increase in the numbers going into it in Africa, but we need to do much more. The G8 summit in a couple of weeks will be immensely important. Both in Washington last week and in Germany a couple of weeks ago, I urged the American and German Governments to do more in respect of Africa and poverty, and I hope very much that those efforts will come to fruition at the G8 conference.

Andrew George: We are halfway through the 15 years set by the rich world to deliver the millennium promise of making poverty history in the poorest countries around the globe, yet despite the fanfare at Gleneagles two years ago, there are stalled trade talks, the obstacle of an increasingly polarised and dangerous world and a failure to deliver the promised aid. As campaigners say, the world cannot wait, so does the Prime Minister believe that G8 leaders will ever live up to the hopes of their people and, if so, what does he believe is now necessary to deliver [ Interruption. ]

Mr. Speaker: Order.

Tony Blair: First, I think that it is important that the G8 leaders live up to the commitments given at Gleneagles, and the next couple of weeks will be absolutely vital in that regard. As a result of Gleneagles, we have wiped out billions of dollars-worth of debt for some of the poorest countries and radically increased the number of children going into primary educationoften precisely because of that debt relief. This country should be proud of the fact that it has trebled its aid to Africa and doubled its overall aid budget. As a result of what we are able to do now on HIV/AIDS, a real difference is being made: hundreds of thousands of lives are being saved in Africa. We have to do more and we will do morethe next couple of weeks will be vital in thatbut we should be particularly proud of what this country has achieved in relation to the millennium development goals.

Early Intervention

Graham Allen: What research he has evaluated on early intervention measures to tackle the causes of inequality, deprivation and under-attainment.

Tony Blair: Helping every child to reach their full potential and closing the attainment gap between disadvantaged young people and their peers is a priority for our education policy. In that respect, the roll-out of children's centres across the countrythere will be 3,500 by 2010the additional support for families with children, particularly the poorest, and early years intervention, when children are at both pre-nursery and nursery stage, are making a real difference, but I agree that much more needs to be done.

Graham Allen: The Prime Minister will be aware that for every pound spent on intensive health visiting for the under-twos, 6 is saved on the costs of criminality, disrupted classes, antisocial behaviour and a lifetime on welfare benefits, so will he welcome the initiative being taken not only by Departments but by partners in Nottingham, to bring forward a package of early intervention measures so that we not only break the inter-generational cycle of deprivation, but save the taxpayer billions of pounds?

Tony Blair: I totally agree with my hon. Friend. I pay tribute to his work and the work that has been done by the city of Nottingham particularly in respect of early intervention for families who are disadvantaged or in difficulty. He is right to say that the more we invest in the early stage, the better the return for the whole country later in life. As a result of the new measures we introduced and announced a couple of weeks ago, we will have the ability, especially through the focused work of health visitors and others, to make sure that children who really need help early in life, and the families who need help, receive it. As a result, as my hon. Friend rightly says, when we are also encouraging families to get off benefit and into work, we will make a real difference to child poverty in this country.

Simon Burns: Will the Prime Minister consider commissioning reports and investigations into early interventions and the potential link between suffering from dyslexia and criminality later in life? Is he aware that there is a unique pilot scheme in Chelmsford prison that has identified that more than 50 per cent. of prisoners suffer from dyslexia? Help is being provided in the prison to allow them to overcome or minimise their problems, but there is no help once they leave prison, which could lead to ongoing problems and a return to criminality.

Tony Blair: The point that the hon. Gentleman makes is good and valid. The Government are now looking at the links with some learning disabilitiesdyslexia is an obvious one. He is absolutely right to say that many of those people in the prison population have not had the educational opportunitiesoften because they are dyslexic, have not been diagnosed properly and have not got the extra help that they need. We are looking specifically at how the early intervention programmes help those people. He is absolutely right in what he says, and when we have the results of the investigation that we are carrying out at the moment we will of course share them with the House.

Engagements

John Grogan: If he will list his official engagements for Wednesday 23 May.

Tony Blair: Before listing my engagements, I am sure that the whole House will once again wish to join me in sending our profound sympathy and condolences to the family and friends of Corporal Jeremy Brookes of 4th Battalion the Rifles, who was killed in Iraq this week by a terrorist bomb. He and others before him died working towards a safer, more secure world and we pay tribute to him.
	This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in the House, I will have further such meetings later today.

John Grogan: I am sure that the whole House wants to be associated with the Prime Minister's remarks.
	Does the Prime Minister agree with me, and indeed with the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, that lobbying firms such as Bell Pottinger and DLA Piper that do not sign up to the industry's voluntary ethical code of standards, which requires transparency in regard to all clients, should seriously consider doing so?

Tony Blair: As I understand it, this is an area that the Public Administration Committee is going to look at. We will of course pay careful attention to the study that it undertakes and to the conclusions that it comes to.

David Cameron: I join the Prime Minister in paying tribute to Corporal Jeremy Brookes and I also pay tribute to Lance Corporal George Davey, who died after a tragic accident at a British base in Afghanistan.
	With more than 40 maternity units under threat in the NHS, including five in Greater Manchester, would the Prime Minister advise the next Prime Minister to stop the closure programme and think again?

Tony Blair: I certainly would not advise stopping a change programme that is absolutely necessary in order to provide the best care for patients. Part of that will of course involve more specialist services, whereby those who need specialist help get it and those who do not need it get a more routine service. That is entirely sensible. It is being clinically driven. We are actually putting more money into maternity services in Manchester and elsewhere.
	Let me just point out to the right hon. Gentleman two reports that came out within the last week. First, the Healthcare Commission reported that 90 per cent. of patients said that the health care that they received inside the NHS was excellent or good. Secondly, there is the international survey that ranks the UK's NHS top, ahead of Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United States of America. One of the reasons for that is the investment that we put in, which he opposed, and the other reason is the necessary changes, which he is now also opposing.

David Cameron: So let us be absolutely clear: the closure programme is continuingthat is what we have learnedeven though deputy leadership candidates are appearing on picket lines and objecting and even though the former chairman of the British Medical Association says that morale in the NHS is at a 30-year low. Across the country, accident and emergency departments are under threat, including five in London. Will the Prime Minister advise the next Prime Minister to stop that closure programme?

Tony Blair: I will give exactly the same response that I gave to the last question, because we are being advisedwith the greatest respect, by those who know better than the right hon. Gentleman how to deliver health care in this countrythat these changes are necessary. Let us be absolutely clear. At the same time that these changes are happening, waiting lists and times are falling and cancer and cardiac treatments are improving, as is the standard of care in the NHS. It was extraordinary that he made a speech earlier this week in which he said that if the Conservatives were returned to power, he would abolish all NHS targets. Let us be quite clear: that would mean that there would be no minimum waiting times, no fall in the waiting lists, no ability for people to see cancer specialists within two weeks and no maximum waits in accident and emergency. That might get him a round of applause from certain parts of the medical profession, but it is not in the interest of patients.

David Cameron: The Prime Minister asks who he should listen to. I will tell him who he should listen to: the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, who says:
	I have never seen so much money wasted...It must be a personal tragedy for Tony Blair. In the recesses of his mind, he must be saying: 'What the hell has gone wrong?'
	Hospitals are closing, 27,000 jobs were lost in the last year, thousands of junior doctors are being lost by the NHS and public confidence in Labour is at an all-time low, so would the Prime Minister advise his successorhe can ask him now; it is a bit like proximity talks todayto keep the Health Secretary in post?

Tony Blair: These are decisions for my right hon. Friend. However, let me point out that, while the right hon. Gentleman says that we have lost thousands of jobs in the NHS, there are now 250,000 more people employed by the NHS. He says that hospitals are closing, but the biggest hospital building programme is now under way. When we came to power, more than half the NHS stock had been built before the NHS came into existence, but the figure is now less than 25 per cent. We have more doctors, lower waiting times and smaller waiting lists. All that the right hon. Gentleman is doing is simply supporting groups that are opposed to change, which I understand. However, the changes are delivering better outcomes for patients. When we get, as we will, at the end of next year to a maximum in-patient and out-patient wait of 18 weeks, including diagnosticswhen we effectively abolish waiting in the national health serviceit will be because of the decisions taken by this Government and in spite of the positions taken by him.

David Cameron: Everyone in the NHS and the country will have noticed that the Prime Minister has hanged his Health Secretary out to dry. Does he not realise the damage that it does to have a lame duck Health Secretary in post for another month?
	Let us look at another Minister who is not up to the job. Last week, the Minister for Housing and Planning told us that the court case against home information packs was completely groundless and had no impact on policy. Yesterday, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government told us that the court case was the very reason why they had to be all but abandoned. Will the Prime Minister advise the next Prime Minister to keep the Housing Minister in post?

Tony Blair: I most certainly will not advise [ Interruption. ] I will not advise abandoning the programme or the home information packs at all. It is extraordinary that the Conservative party is opposing energy performance certificates [ Interruption. ] Yes, it is absolutely typical. The right hon. Gentleman says that he cares about the environment, but when there is a specific measure to help the environment, he opposes it. He opposed the climate change levy and he now opposes energy performance certificates. He cannot say where he stands on nuclear power or any of the issues in today's White Paper. The fact of the matter, as ever, is that when it comes to serious politics, we take the decisions, he makes the gestures.

David Cameron: Everybody knows that energy performance certificates could be introduced anywaythat fig leaf is not even green. Last Wednesday in the House of Commons, the Housing Minister [ Interruption. ] The Prime Minister should listen[Hon. Members: Ooh!] Well, he is not going to be here much longer.
	The Prime Minister's Housing Minister led us to believe that there were 1,100 registered home inspectors ready to go. Yesterday, it was admitted that there were fewer than half that number. Never mind what the next Prime Minister is going to do; what on earth is the Minister still doing in her job?

Tony Blair: First, let me say that more than 3,000 people have passed their exams and can now get accreditation. Now that the court case has been dealt with, those people can come forward and be accredited. I thought that it was amazing that the right hon. Gentleman said that he supported the energy performance certificate. As he supports its introduction, is it not sensible to make the introduction at the point of sale of a house so that buyers can see what measures they can take to protect the environment? After all, as all the environmental groups point out, 25 per cent. of carbon dioxide emissions come from households. Why is the right hon. Gentleman opposed to this measure if he supports the energy performance certificate?

David Cameron: I know the walls of the bunker are pretty thick, but has the Prime Minister not noticed that this policy has completely collapsed? He told us that he had so much to do in his dying weeks, yet home information packs are in chaos, he set up a Ministry of Justice without even telling his Lord Chancellor, and he is doing nothing to stop the cuts, the closures and the plummeting morale in the health service. The chairman of the British Medical Association resigned on Sunday and he will leave office on Friday. Is not that an example that the Prime Minister should follow?

Tony Blair: I think that it is instructive to look at what both parties have been doing this week. Today, we have the energy White Papera major task to ensure that we have energy security for the future. Yesterday, we had the draft Local Transport Bill, which allows us to reregulate the buses and introduce local road pricing. On Monday, we had the planning proposals, which are supported by industry and, incidentally, opposed by the Conservative party. And we have digital X-ray imaging for the national health service. That is what we have been doing. What has the right hon. Gentleman been doing?trying to persuade his party that grammar schools are not the answer to education. I happen to agree with him, but frankly that is an argument from the stone age. Therefore while the Labour party has been getting on with the serious business of politics, he cannot even take his party with him on that issue.

Andrew MacKinlay: Will the Prime Minister invite the Chancellor of the Exchequer to accompany him to the European Union summit? Does he realise that not to do so would appear churlish and discourteous and that the British people require that the Prime Minister-elect be there, accompanying him and sharing in decisions that cannot be reversed?

Tony Blair: I assure my hon. Friend that the position that is taken in the European summit will be the position of the Government. We have already set out that position: we do not want a constitutional treaty; we want a simplifying amending treaty, and I am sure that we will manage to get it.

Menzies Campbell: I join the Prime Minister, once again, in his expressions of sympathy and condolence.
	Can the Prime Minister explain why, in his manifestos of 1997, 2001 and 2005, he did not seek a mandate for renewed generation by nuclear power stations? Why is he so hellbent on nuclear power now?  [ Interruption. ]

Tony Blair: Sorry, I missed that one.  [ Interruption. ] No, I do not think that that is reasonable.
	As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry will explain today, we are 80 to 90 per cent. self-sufficient in oil and gas at the moment, but that will declinecompletely in relation to gas and largely in relation to oil. In addition, a lot of our fleet of power stations will become obsolete and our nuclear power stations will become obsolete. If we want to have secure energy supplies and reduce CO2 emissions, we have to put nuclear power on the agenda. If people are not prepared to do that, I would like them to explain how we will manage to reduce the dramatic decline in our self-sufficiency that I have described, and how we will be able, through wind power or renewables, to make up the huge deficit that nuclear power will leave. If we are about serious policy making, we have to confront and take decisions on those issues.

Menzies Campbell: It came out very clearly in the Cabinet Office review of 2003. Why is the Prime Minister so committed to nuclear power, in a way that suggests that he disregards the issues of risk, cost and toxic waste? Where is the investment in wave, wind and tidal power and clean-coal technology, which would give us a secure, non-nuclear future?

Tony Blair: First, we are boosting renewable energy significantly, but let us be absolutely clear: we will not be able to make up through wind farms all of the deficit from nuclear powerwe just will not be able to do it. In addition, we have had nuclear power in this country for more than half a century without the problems to which the right hon. and learned Gentleman draws attention. I also urge him to look round the world. He will see that at the present timeI think that I am right in saying thisthere are something like 70 to 80 new proposals for nuclear power stations, and that is for a perfectly sensible reason. Every country round the world is looking at two problems: securing energy supply with sufficient diversity, and reducing CO2 emissions. The reason why we should look at nuclear power as an option is that if we do not, we arein my view, for reasons of ideologysimply putting it to one side when plainly many others around the world are coming to the opposite conclusion.

Bill Olner: I am sure that the whole House will wish to extend its sympathies to my constituents, Bill and Julia Hawker, whose 22-year-old daughter Lindsay was murdered in Japan some two months ago. Although the police over there have been doing their best to apprehend the killer, they have not been successful, and I know that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary raised the issue yesterday in a visit to Japan. May I ask my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister to talk to the Prime Minister of Japan, to put his authority behind the effort to ensure that the killer is caught, and to ensure that the Japanese state police are involved? Finally, I ask him to get the Prime Minister of Japan to invite someone from the UK police on to the case as an observer, so that they can provide a good link back to Mr. and Mrs. Hawker, who need some essential support.

Tony Blair: First, may I join with my hon. Friend in extending my sympathy and condolences to the Hawker family? As he knows, the Foreign Office has been closely in touch with the family throughout, and it is important that we continue to provide all possible assistance. I also understand that the Japanese authorities are treating it as a major case; there are something like 100 police officers or more working on it. However, I will reflect carefully on what my hon. Friend is saying, both in relation to the Japanese Prime Minister and in respect of any help that the British police can give, and I will come back to him on those points. In the mean time, I assure him that we will keep in the closest possible contact with the family.

Richard Spring: Considering the massive health deficits and high council taxes in the east of England, may I tell the Prime Minister how interested my constituents would be to know that in Scotland public spending per head is higher by 40 per cent.? In retrospect, does the Prime Minister consider that to have been a worthwhile investment?

Tony Blair: I do support the Barnett formula, as a matter of fact. It is there for very specific reasons, and it has been there for almost 30 years. Let us be absolutely clear: as well as the extra investment that has gone into Scotland, with the Barnett formula applying there, there has been extra investment in education and health, not least in the hon. Gentleman's constituency. He need only look around to see the massive amount of investment in, for example, new health care facilities in his constituency, schools in his constituency, and programmes such as Sure Start and the new deal. Of course, the Barnett formula will no doubt continue to be an issue of dispute, for the Conservative party at least, but I think that we have put a major amount of investment into our public services, and that investment is paying off.

Gordon Prentice: Our mutual friend the Chancellor has spoken about rebuilding trust in public life. Does my friend agree with me that the best way forward would be to transfer responsibility for the appointment, terms of reference and terms of office of constitutional watchdogs such as the Committee on Standards in Public Life from No. 10, where prerogative powers are used, to Parliament, where they can be set up by statute?

Tony Blair: I am sure that that will be an interesting debate for the future, but for the present I can say that I have no plans to change the situation.

Elfyn Llwyd: May I ask the Prime Minister to intervene personally in the debate, or rather the litigation, between the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirersthe miners' unionand the Government relating to knee injuries suffered by ex-miners? Will he please request Ministers from the Department of Trade and Industry to engage constructively, so that we can try to avoid long drawn-out litigation? If he were so to intervene, I would be the first to congratulate him on his term of office, and to wish him a long and happy retirement.

Tony Blair: In respect of that particular court case, I would have to see what it would be proper for me to do by way of intervention. I think that I am right in saying that over 3 billion has now been put in as compensation for people, particularly miners, over the past few years. We are aware of the NACODS dispute, and we are aware of the sensitivity of it. I will see what it is possible for me properly to do, but he cannot take it as a firm commitment until I have looked at the degree to which I am able to help.

Kitty Ussher: In the 1980s, my predecessor brought Minister after Minister to view Burnley's derelict housing problems, but it took the election of a Labour Government before we finally got the housing market renewal programme that was so desperately needed. However, the Liberal Democrat-Tory administration on Burnley council is moving too slowly in administering that scheme. Last year, it did not even spend the money that we allocated it under that programme. Before my right hon. Friend leaves office, will he stick a rocket under the local authority and local agencies so that my constituents get the regenerated communities that they need and deserve?

Tony Blair: I obviously agree entirely with my hon. Friend that the regeneration money that has been put into our inner cities, particularly the housing programmes and pathfinder project, has produced tremendous benefits. Some 35,000 homes around the country, including 1,800 in east Lancashire, have benefited. Of course, that is absolutely typical of the way in which the Lib Dems and the Tories get together, as they do not have the proper facility to make sure that those things count, or that the money is properly used and invested in some of the poorest communities in the country, which is one very good reason, without reverting to the previous question, why Lib Dems and Tories do not make a very good coalition.

Bob Neill: Is the Prime Minister aware that as the NHS in south-east London struggles with a 65 million-plus accumulated deficit, largely as the result of flawed private finance initiative projects, the one hospital earmarked for closureSt. Mary's, which serves the Chislehurst part of my constituencydoes not have a PFI contract? Will he assure my constituents that they will not lose their local hospital and A and E to bail out the Chancellor of the Exchequer's pet botch-up?

Tony Blair: First, in respect of Queen Mary's, I understand that no decisions on its future or, indeed, of any hospital in the area have been made, so the hon. Gentleman is somewhat premature in his condemnation. Secondly, in respect of his attack on PFI, there have been 26 PFI and hospital schemes in his strategic health authority, with a value of 1.7 billion. Twenty-eight LIFT schemes have opened and 13 are under construction in his strategic health authority. I do not know whether he speaks for his party on this issue, but if he is signalling Conservative opposition to PFI, he should know that we would never have achieved the renewal of our hospital stock without it. It is absolutely essential, as it ties companies down to delivering budgets on time and on cost. The reason for the budget deficit is the same in many parts of the country: hospitals and NHS trusts must live within their means, and it is right that a system of financial accountability should be introduced. If he is trying to say that PFI has not delivered for his constituency, I suggest that he take a look around it.

Tony Wright: Has my right hon. Friend noticed that the former head of his delivery unit, Sir Michael Barber, has said that the power of a Prime Minister is too weak, rather than too strong? He said that it needs to be strengthened and that there should be a Prime Minister's Department. Does my right hon. Friend agree with that, and would he recommend it to his successor?

Tony Blair: I always thought that Michael Barber was a very sound man, and I think that that is an even sounder suggestion. However, it will be for my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr. Brown) to decide.

Annette Brooke: Given that next year is the national year of reading, will the Prime Minister give his support to the campaign by the right to read alliance to improve access to text for visually impaired children? In particular, does he support a pilot project that is being discussed with his officials?

Tony Blair: We do support the aims of the right to read campaign[Hon. Members: Reading!] and the Royal National Institute of the Blind is quite right in saying that it is a very important issue. I understand that a feasibility project is being conducted by the Department of Trade and Industry and the RNIB. We are obviously not in a position to publish the conclusions yet, but I know that when we can do so we will want to do everything we can to encourage the project. The question is obviously one of cost and working out how that can be properly done. However, we support the general aims, and the feasibility project will be concluded shortly.

Madeleine Moon: At 10.42 on Sunday morning, my office answerphone picked up a message from the congregation of Gilgal Baptist church during their morning service. They asked me to bring a message to the Prime Minister and the Chancellor that they should continue to force through the standards and changes in the millennium development goals. What answer can I take to them?

Tony Blair: One of complete support.

Warships

Julian Lewis: For what reason the numbers of frigates and destroyers to be deployed by the Royal Navy have been reduced from the total set out in the 1998 strategic defence review.

Tony Blair: As we said in the White Paper that we published in July 2004, we judged at that time that we needed fewer destroyers and frigates because of the reduced conventional threat and because of the improved technology of the new warships that are now coming into service. We are therefore putting more resources into programmes such as the future aircraft carriers and the Bay class landing ships, which will be vastly more capable and versatile than the ships that they are replacing.

Julian Lewis: That is indeed what was said in 2004, but what was said in 1998 was that we needed 32 frigates and destroyers. The warships then were just as technologically advanced as the ones referred to several years later. When it comes to believing the Prime Minister or believing successive First Sea Lords who have said, in and out of office, that we need 30 frigates and destroyers, I know which I would believe. The Prime Minister has cut them from 35 to 25. Will he now guarantee that he is not going to cut them further by mothballing another six frigates and destroyers?

Tony Blair: The hon. Gentleman asks why the situation is different as between July 2004 and 1998. It is true that in 1998 we said that there should be 32 such frigates and destroyers, and in 2004 we reduced that number to 25, but we then increased the number or the capability of the alternative vessels.

Julian Lewis: indicated dissent.

Tony Blair: The hon. Gentleman should wait for the answer before he shakes his head; he may shake it afterwards. As a matter of fact, we are the party that has increased defence spending, whereas his party cut it by 30 per cent. The amount of money that we are putting into the new warship programme, which is huge and amounts to 14 billion over the next few years, is exactly the same as was predicated back in 1998, but we are spending it differently. That is change, and very sensible too.

Energy White Paper

Alistair Darling: With permission, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I should like to make a statement on the energy White Paper and the consultation on the future of nuclear power, which I am publishing today. Copies of these, together with several accompanying papers, are in the Vote Office.
	As I said last year, we face two big challenges: first, the need, with other countries, to tackle climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions; and secondly, the need to ensure that we have secure and affordable energy supplies. Both are vital for our future prosperity; both are global issues calling for action internationally as well as action here at home.
	The evidence supporting the need for urgent action on climate change continues to mount. Sir Nicholas Stern's report last autumn underlined the importance of acting now, and together with other countries. If not tackled, climate change poses catastrophic humanitarian consequences and economic costs.
	Meanwhile, world energy demand continues to grow. It is expected to be 50 per cent. higher by 2030 than it is today, and it is likely to be met largely by fossil fuels for some time to come. That means rising greenhouse gas emissions and greater competition for energy resources, which has massive implications for both climate change and security of supply.
	Here in the UK, our reserves of oil and gas are declining. Although significant amounts remain in the North sea, production has hit its peak and is now falling. As we made clear, we will make the most of our reserves, but as our economy grows we will become increasingly dependent on imports in a world where supplies are concentrated often in less stable regions. We need to take action to manage those risks.
	In the next few years, energy companies will also need to replace ageing power stations and other infrastructure, so we need to create the right conditions for that investment to get timely and increasingly low-carbon energy supplies. The White Paper sets out a long-term framework for action to tackle those challenges at home and abroad.
	The White Paper sets out our international strategy, which acknowledges that we need to tackle climate change and energy security together. Influenced by the UK, the European Council has agreed to a new strategy, including commitments to competitive markets, cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, more renewable energy and a central role for the European Union emissions trading scheme as a potential basis for a global carbon market. We also need to influence the wider international community, notably in getting a consensus on the post-2012 Kyoto framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It also sets out the measures that we are taking here at home. We have already published a draft Climate Change Billwhich, for the first time, would impose a legally binding duty on Government to reduce the amount of carbon that is producedas we work towards our target of achieving at least a 60 per cent. reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. We are the first country in the world to do that.
	Faced with such challenges, more is needed. The first priority must be to save energy. The White Paper sets out a range of measures to help us to become more energy efficient and cut energy use. Consumers need better information about how they can save energy. Next year and the year after, any householder who asks for them can get free, visual real-time displays that show the amount of electricity that they use. In parallel, we will work with the industry to ensure that consumers have visual displays, together with smart meters, in 10 years. In addition, better and clearer energy bills will help.
	It is estimated that leaving electric appliances on stand-by uses about 7 per cent. of all electricity in UK homes. That is equivalent to the electricity generated from two 600 MW gas-fired power stations or from more than 1,500 2 MW wind turbines. We will work with industry and others to improve the efficiency of domestic appliances to phase out inefficient goods and limit the amount of stand-by energy wasted.
	If we are to make a genuine difference to reducing energy demand, we need a stronger obligation on energy companies to provide their residential customers with energy-saving measures. The White Paper therefore proposes that from next year they double their current effort, and from 2012 we aim to transform the way in which they see their relationship with their customers, shifting the focus to the provision of energy services, increasing energy efficiency and saving carbon in the home, rather than simply selling them gas and electricity.
	We will also require big organisations such as supermarkets, banks or hotel chains and large public sector organisations to limit their emissions and set tougher standards for the homes that we build and the products that we buy. We need more low-carbon generation of electricity and heat. We want to encourage the enthusiasm of individuals and communities to generate their energy locally, for example in homes or schools, through solar panels and wind turbines. We are therefore introducing a range of measures to support that approach. As part of that, we will remove the barriers and simplify the licensing regime so that more communities can the follow the example of Woking, including by developing combined heat and power schemes.
	However, we still need large-scale energy investment. In the next 20 to 30 years, we need new generating capacity equivalent to approximately one third of our existing capacity. Our aim must be to ensure that companies have a wide range of options available so that we can retain a diverse energy mix, which is good both for our security of supply and will help us to move to an increasingly low-carbon economy.
	Renewables are crucial. We are strengthening support for renewable electricity. The reform of the renewables obligation is essential, and means that by 2015 we expect that around 15 per cent. of our electricity supplies will come from renewablesthat is triple the current amount in only eight years. In transport, the road transport fuel obligation will save a million tonnes of carbon a year. We want to double it only if we can be satisfied that it is sustainable to do so.
	New technologies will also help. We want British-based business to be at the forefront of new green technology. That is why we set up the Energy Technologies Institute, which brings public and private investment together, now with a minimum budget of 600 million. We will launch a competition for the demonstration of carbon capture and storage, which has the potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel power stations by as much as 90 per cent., which is important as we will rely on gas and coal power, including coal mined in the UK, for some time to come. Details are set out in the White Paper.
	We want to save energy, and we want low-carbon sources of energy. That is why we will do everything that we can to encourage renewables such as wind, wave and tidal power. But that alone will not be enough if we are to minimise our costs and risks. Alongside the White Paper, we are publishing a consultation document on nuclear power, so that we can take a decision on whether companies should have that option when making their investment decisions. We have reached the preliminary view that it would be in the public interest to allow energy companies to invest in nuclear power. Before making our decision, however, we are consulting further. The White Paper makes clear the complexities of the challenges that we face in terms of climate change and energy security. There is no single answer to those challenges. As wide a choice of low-carbon options as possible is needed, so that we do not become over-reliant on any one form of electricity generation.
	Nuclear is an important part of our current energy mix. We get about 18 per cent. of our electricity from nuclear power stations, which are a low-carbon form of generating electricity. That provides a regular and steady supply of electricity, whereas electricity generated from most renewables is, by its very nature, intermittent. Every year, a modern nuclear reactor saves about 2.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere, compared with an equivalent gas-fired station.
	Most nuclear power stations are set to close over the next 10 to 20 years at a time when we know that demand for electricity is going up because of economic growth. Quite simply, in the public interest we need to make a decision this year on whether we continue to get some of our electricity from nuclear, because new stations take a long time to build. If nuclear is excluded, there is every chance that its place will be taken by gas or coal generation, which emits carbon. Yes, carbon capture and storage, if it can be developed, would help, but at this stage we cannot be certainthere is no commercial-scale operation of carbon capture and storage on power generation anywhere in the world.
	Although we want more renewable energy as part of the mix, it, too, is controversial. There are more than 170 applications in the planning process at the moment. It will be for the private sector to initiate, fund, construct and operate new nuclear plants and cover the cost of decommissioning and its full share of long-term waste management costs. There are important issues to consider, including waste, and those will be examined in the consultation, which will run until October.
	Our measures, including those in the White Paper, put us on track to make savings of carbon emissions of between 23 and 33 million tonnes by 2020. If we meet the upper end of that range, it would be the equivalent of removing all the emissions from every car, van and lorry on Britain's roads today. By saving energy, encouraging new timely investment in gas import and storage infrastructure and maximising recovery of UK reserves of oil, gas and coal, our measures will also help security of supply.
	We cannot become a low-carbon economy in a single step. Further measures will be needed if we are to achieve our long-term goals in the light of further international agreements in Europe and more widely. The White Paper sets out a framework for action to enable us to make real progress now towards tackling climate change and ensuring secure and affordable energy supplies. I commend this statement to the House.

Alan Duncan: I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of the statement. At its heart, however, there is confusion. The Government say that certain things must be done, but their policy, at best, says that they might be done. The current Prime Minister says that the replacement of nuclear power stations is back on the agenda with a vengeance. The future Prime Minister says that a new generation of nuclear power stations will be built across the country. The most that the Secretary of State says, however, is that nuclear plant could be part of the future energy mix, and that it is for the private sector to take decisions over new nuclear power stations.
	Whatever the rhetoric, nothing in the White Paper will guarantee that a single nuclear power station will ever be built. Where has the vengeance for nuclear power gone? Are the Government saying that nuclear new build will definitely happen, or not? How many new nuclear power stations will definitely be built as a result of the White Paper? How can the Secretary of State deliver a UK-wide energy policy if Scotland rejects nuclear power? If the Scottish National party has rejected both nuclear in principle and wind in practice, is the SNP's policy anything other than utter lunacy?
	Business will invest in nuclear power only if it knows its costs. It needs certainty about carbon, decommissioning and waste. There is no greater clarity on those issues today, so what will happen if no one comes forward to invest? Over a year ago the Prime Minister said of new nuclear build that
	if we don't take these long-term decisions now, we will be committing a serious dereliction of duty.
	Today in  The Times he says merely that we must consider it, so what decisions have been taken to address that dereliction?
	Last July we set out our objectives. We called for a cap and trade scheme for CO2 based on auctioned rights, for site and type licensing, and for reform of the renewables obligation and the climate change levy. In addition, we said that there must be long-term certainty for investors. As we keep on saying, if this could lead to broad agreement between us and the Government, that would be good for Britain.
	In today's announcement, there are detailed proposals for banding the renewables obligation, but these will not overcome its central flaws. On what basis, therefore, has the Secretary of State assessed and then chosen to reject the considered alternative put forward by Ofgem?
	Hidden in the statement is bad news about carbon capture. Will the Secretary of State confirm that his failure already to agree a pilot project for it means that any prospect of it happening has been seriously delayed? Is it not the truth that far from being on the edge of happening, carbon capture is about to be deferred and endangered? How on earth will carbon capture ever happen if it is still clobbered by the climate change levy? When will the Government remove the perversity of keeping a dirty tax on a clean process?
	On strategic infrastructure projects, we welcome site and type licensing and the streamlining of the planning process. However, we have grave concerns about entrusting that to an accountable quango.
	Our policy statement last July called for the greater use of carbon trading. A broad and rational regime for carbon trading is crucial to incentivise low carbon technologies. We therefore welcome the Government's announcement that they will broaden the scope of carbon trading to cover a greater number of businesses. We think permits should be auctioned. Will the Secretary of State tell us how and when they will be?
	Climate change is the greatest threat that we face. That is why we supported the Government in signing up to tough EU targets on emissions and renewables in March, but at present we get just 2 per cent. of our total energy from renewables. Raising that to 20 per cent. was always going to be challenging, to put it mildly, but is it not true that today's plans will, at best, get us only about halfway to that target? Is it not the case that despite the clear wish expressed in the White Paper to encourage local and decentralised energy, there is almost nothing that amounts to a robust policy that will make it happen? Again and again, the White Paper wills the ends, but does not provide the means.
	In households, smart metering could greatly increase energy efficiency and help customers to export electricity back into the grid, but the Government are supporting the limited clip-on visual electricity displays. Does this intervention not pull the rug from under the real smart meter market? Why are the Government going for the most basic option, when real smart meters would help to stimulate the microgeneration industry?
	Today's announcement has already been twice delayed. It is Labour's third White Paper, following dozens of consultations, and it is the product of their third energy review under their ninth Energy Minister. It offers nothing definite on nuclear or anything else. It heralds the potential collapse of carbon capture. It continues an irrational regime for carbon penalties and incentives. It provides little or no prospect of hitting renewables targets. It does not offer the security that we need. Ten months after the energy review, it is still content-free, not carbon-free.

Alistair Darling: Although the hon. Gentleman undoubtedly received my statement, I am sorry that, yet again, he did not have an opportunity to read it before he responded to me. Let me start with nuclear. As I understand his position nowI may have got it wrong, because it seems rather different from his position 12 months agohe is berating the Government for not having said today, Look, we're definitely going ahead with nuclear. That comes from the hon. Gentleman, who at the beginning of last year said:
	From about the age of 12, I have had an instinctive hostility to nuclear power.[ Official Report, 17 January 2006; Vol. 441, c. 779.]
	This is the man now urging us not to consult or do anything other than press on with it. His policy, as I understand it, is that nuclear should be deployed only as a last resort. In other words, only when it became clear that we cannot meet our obligations through renewable or other means would the hon. Gentleman say, Okay, let's consider nuclear. That seems to me to be absolute nonsense.
	The hon. Gentleman asked me about the renewables obligation. I know that it is Tory policy to get rid of the renewables obligation, yet it has meant that we have doubled the amount of wind farm energy over the past two and a half years and that we are on track to reach the target of 15 per cent. by 2015triple the current amount, as clearly set out in the White Paper. The Tory policy is to get rid of it. On top of that, Tory councils up and down the country are objecting to wind farms.  [Interruption.] Let us take the London Arrayone of the largest offshore wind farms in Europe to which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and I consented. Who is objecting to it? Tory [Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The shadow Secretary of State has asked some questions, so I think that the Opposition Front Benchers should allow the Secretary of State to answer them.

Alistair Darling: The point is that in respect of both nuclear and renewables, the position of the shadow Secretary of State is muddled, confused and full of contradictions.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about the European emissions trading scheme. We wholeheartedly support it and believe that it should be tougher. It has an auctionary element to it. I am sorry, of course, that from the hon. Gentleman's point of view, it is in Europe, but there we are. That is just one of the things we have to deal with.
	In relation to carbon capture and storage, we have taken a step forward that no other Government have taken. We are in discussion with about half a dozen large institutions that are interested in seeing it developed. Yes, it does take time. Nowhere in the world is a commercially operating CCS system in place, but we are determined to ensure that Britain is in the forefront of this technology, which is why I have been able to announce further details in the White Paper.
	I am glad that the hon. Gentleman supports our proposals on planningalthough that was not immediately obvious on Monday afternoon when the hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman), who speaks for the Tories, rather gave the opposite impression. As to decentralised energy, which is important, measures are proposed to remove some of the barriers that stand in the way of decentralised energy. We want to encourage thatfor individuals and for schools, for example.
	The hon. Gentleman criticised us for not having a commitment to the installation of smart meters. I therefore invite him again to read my statement and the White Paper, which both make it abundantly clear that we want smart meters introduced for business and companies. Yes, it takes time, because it does not make economic sense to go into everybody's house tomorrow morning, rip out existing meters and install others just like that. On top of that, as I said earlier, from 2008-09 any householder wanting a free visual display to see how much electricity is used will be able to get it. The hon. Gentleman, rather like me, has been in his post for about a year. We are now two years into this Parliament and it is quite clear to me that the Conservatives still do not have an energy policy.

Jamie Reed: I thank my right hon. Friend for putting forward such a thorough and courageous White Paper, which really provides what we need. I am particularly pleased that he has exposed the gesture politics that passes for energy policy on the Opposition Benches. Will he tell us how soon it will be before the methodology for the siting process for the new nuclear stations is brought forward?

Alistair Darling: First, we have to consult on the principle of ensuring that nuclear remains an option that can be considered by generators in the future. We want to consult on that. In parallel, we are also publishing documents relating to licensing and siting. My hon. Friend is quite right to say that nuclear is a controversial and difficult issue, but I am quite clear in my mind that it is important to have a mix of energy supply so that we do not become over-dependent on one particular source. It really is important that we do not become over-dependent on imported gas, which is bad for the environment and very worrying for the security of energy supplies in the future.

Susan Kramer: On our analysis, by 2050 we can reduce emissions from the power-generating sector by 94 per cent. entirely without nuclear power. Bringing in nuclear has the effect only of displacing renewables rather than gas, so nuclear brings no advantages on climate change and no advantages in security of supply in the long term. All it does is leave us farther away from a completely renewable system.
	Does the Secretary of State agree that carbon capture and storage will provide a better interim technology than nuclear to keep emissions low and plug any gaps in the supply system while wind, wave and tide technologies are brought on-stream? Has he not readon the basis of his statement, I do wonderthe words of Scottish and Southern Energy on carbon capture last week to the effect that all the technology is proven at the desired scale, so we are demonstrating the ability to integrate technologies? Did not the Government sign up to a binding EU commitment on CCS by 2020? Will the Secretary of State acknowledge that CCS is more compatible with a rapid increase in renewable forms of energy and with microgeneration, because it can accommodate variations in loadthe intermittent energy that the Secretary of State mentionedwhile nuclear does not do so efficiently?
	Will the Secretary of State confirm that the Government have accepted a binding commitment for 20 per cent. of all energy, not just electricity, to come from renewable sources by 2020? In his White Paper, he targets 15 per cent. of electricity by 2015, so could he please somehow integrate those two statements? Does his document on the future of nuclear power continue to assert below-market price financing for nuclear power, as he did in earlier documents and appears to continue to do today? Given his strong statements in favour of nuclear in the media today, does he think that his consultation will be seen as genuine?
	Will the Secretary of State also confirm that by 2050, the effect of nuclear would be to reduce the percentage of electricity generated using gas from something like 19 per cent. to something like 15 per cent., and that that negates completely any argument that nuclear would significantly increase security of supply?
	Finally, I welcome the right hon. Gentleman's adoption of our proposals for a cap and trade scheme on energy efficiency and for smart metering, but why has he missed the chance offered by the White Paper to take firm action on social tariffs for vulnerable consumers? There are so many areas where the Government have made or could make U-turns, so why have they chosen to make a U-turn on the one policy that they got right the first time round?

Alistair Darling: I agree with the hon. Lady in what she says about renewable energy. I want to see far more of it, particularly wind or wave power, as and when the technology allows it, but I am sure she would agree that, although there are some interesting developments on wave power, it is still very much in its infancy. On wind power, she will not be surprised to hear me say that her words would carry a great deal more credence if Liberal Democrat councillors up and down the country were not objecting to just about every wind farm that ever comes up for consideration. They also object to any power line that would carry the energy from the wind farms to where it is needed. It is a problem that all politicians must face: we can be in favour of something in principle and in favour of a good idea like renewables, but we then have to back the means to make it possible. As I said in my statement, more than 170 applications for wind farms are now blocked in the planning systemmany of them by Liberal Democrat councillors, so the hon. Lady should have a word with them about that.
	Let me deal with some of the hon. Lady's further points. The 20 per cent. commitment on renewables and energy was entered into by the Heads of Government at the European Council. It is a European target. We discuss it in the White Paper and refer to the fact that we need to take account of it. We support what Europe is trying to do, and the allocation of the 20 per cent. target among the 27 member states will, I suspect, be a matter of some debatenot necessarily in this country, but certainly in some othersparticularly in respect of what exactly constitutes a renewable and how it will be allocated. It is important for Europe to act in a number of ways. It is also committed to liberalising the energy market in Europe, which is very important.
	On the cap and trade proposals for business, I am glad that the hon. Lady welcomes them. It is important for supermarkets, banks and large-scale public sector organisations to be brought into the scheme. They are not in it now, so it is important to help us meet our objectives.
	In relation to the whole question of nuclear, yes I have changed my mind. I used to be sceptical about nuclear power, but two facts have changed my mind. First, it is now clear that the rate of damage being done to the climate by carbon emissions is such that we need to do something about it, and nuclear is a low-carbon source of energy. Secondly, I am increasingly concerned by that fact that, as we obtain less and less oil and gas from the North sea, having to import more gas from areas of the world that are sometimes not politically stable could put our security of supply at risk. The Liberal Democrats might be willing to do that, but I am not.

Several hon. Members: rose

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I need the help of right hon. and hon. Members. I am aware that this is an Opposition day but, equally, this is an important statement. Brevity would therefore be extremely helpful if I am to protect that later business.

Gavin Strang: I agree with my right hon. Friend that renewable energy sources have a vital role to play. He will be aware, however, that there are apprehensions that the production of certain imported biofuels is environmentally damaging and can even have a negative effect on net emissions of greenhouse gases; in other words, it can increase them. What steps are being taken to address that issue?

Alistair Darling: My right hon. Friend makes a perfectly good point. Most of us would like to see more biofuels, and I referred in my statement to our commitment to go to 5 per cent. in relation to petrol and diesel. He is also right, however, to say that their production must be sustainable and that we must not damage the environment elsewhere by growing those products. We are having discussions with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport about how that will work, and how we can be satisfied that the production of biofuels does not result in the destruction of forests, for example. My right hon. Friend has made a very good point, and we are alive to the issue.

Peter Luff: Although I am not sure that it was wise of the Secretary of State to pre-empt his statement to the House on the Today programme this morning, may I congratulate him on the calm way in which he stood up to the simple rudeness of John Humphrys during the interview? I did not disagree with anything that the right hon. Gentleman said in that interview, subject to my studying the detail of his proposals. Does he understand my concern, however, that the policy framework that he has set out in the White Paperwhen I come to read itwill be insufficiently robust to guarantee his own commitment on renewables, never mind the European commitment, or to provide the incentives for private sector investors to invest in the new generation of nuclear power stations that I believe is necessary?

Alistair Darling: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his kind words, and I look forward to hearing his next interview with Mr. Humphrys in the light of what he has just said. He must let me know when he is on.
	I am convinced that the renewables obligation has made a real difference. The changes that we are announcing today, which will band the obligation to provide greater incentives towards new technologies such as wave power, will also help. We have had a lot of discussions with the industry about this, and I believe that this proposal will provide them with the certainty that they need to carry on increasing the amount of renewable energy.
	The House is well aware of the history of our debates on nuclear power. Earlier this year, the High Court held that we needed to carry out a far more thorough consultation, and I have no problem with doing that. Indeed, when hon. Members have had a chance to read the consultation, they will see that it is very thorough and that it goes into all the matters that I hope the public will want to know about. We need to reach a view at the end of this year. I am encouraged by the fact that a lot of the large generators now acknowledge the economics of change; they know that there is going to be a carbon price. We would like that to be tougher than it is at present, but I think that they can see the general direction of travel, which is important. I hope that the proposals that I have set out today will provide us with a framework that will help us to meet our energy needs over the next 30 to 40 years, while at the same time putting us on a path towards reducing the amount of energy that we consume. To my mind, that is absolutely critical.

Eric Illsley: My right hon. Friend's predecessor stood at the Dispatch Box about 18 months ago and said practically the same things as my right hon. Friend has said today. We seem to have had review after review over the past two or three years before arriving at this situation. May I urge him to get on with making some decisions about our future energy needs? Regardless of the decisions on nuclear power, one of our future energy sources will be coal. We will have to burn coal for some years to come. Will he give further encouragement to advanced clean coal technology, and particularly to the fluidised bed system, a waste-to-energy production method using obliteration on a fluidised bed?

Alistair Darling: I understand perfectly what my hon. Friend is saying. I think that I am right in saying that a good deal of work has been done in his local council area on biomass. A lot has been done in the past 18 months. Apart from anything else, we have almost doubled the amount of energy that we get from wind farms in just over that period, which is important. There have also been developments in the European Union emissions trading scheme. My hon. Friend is quite right to say that we will depend on coal; we do so very substantially at the moment. Two things are necessary to get cleaner coalalthough that is a comparative term in relation to carbon emissionsand to move to carbon capture and storage. I should have dealt with this point earlier, because it was raised by the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer). It is true to say that the technology to capture, transport and store the carbon exists, but it has not actually been joined up on a commercial basis yet. That is why I am so reluctant to say, Let's abandon nuclear now. These things might never become available. I have said on many occasions that we should not put all our eggs in one basket. It makes sense to have a sensible mix, and it would make no sense at all to put off these decisions in the hope that they will not come back to bite us one day.

James Paice: The Secretary of State talked tantalisingly in his statement about local power generation and decentralised power, butapart from just now in response to a questionhe made no reference to biomass or biogas, both of which are renewables that we can produce from our own resources. One of the obstacles to their production is the fact that the renewables obligation is difficult to access for small-scale generators. Is there anything in the White Paper that will make it easier for those generators to access the renewables obligation, so that our biomass and biogas industries can really get going?

Alistair Darling: On the hon. Gentleman's general point, the banding of the renewables obligation will help biomass production. We are also publishing further proposals today that I hope will help in that regard. I take his point about small-scale applications, and I hope that we can do something to encourage that industry. I urge him to look at the White Paper and at the separate paper that we have published on biomass. I hope that that will be of help to him, but I would be happy to discuss the matter further.

Tom Clarke: I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement. Will he share with the House his thinking on social tariffs for vulnerable consumers? I am sure that he is aware that during the recent debates in the House and in Committee on the Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Bill, which will introduce the national consumer council, a great deal of concern was expressed about the fact that suppliers are simply not passing on reductions in wholesale energy prices timeously to some of the poorest consumers. It was also felt that Ofgem either does not have teeth or chooses not to act in the face of that disgraceful behaviour, which is clearly undermining the Government's positive policies on fuel poverty and inflation.

Alistair Darling: I very much agree with my right hon. Friend. We have made a commitment to reduce fuel poverty, and the increase in wholesale gas prices, which was reflected in the price that consumers paid over the past 18 months, has set back progress quite substantially. The fact that wholesale prices are now coming down as a result of action that has been taken over that period is encouraging, but there are further things that we need to do. There is a discussion in the White Paper about social tariffs. As my right hon. Friend will know, different power companies have taken different approaches to this issue, but we want them all to take action because they have a real obligation to do so. I want to make it clear that if that does not happen, we might well have to consider legislation to ensure that further action is taken. We are also introducing other measures that will take about 200,000 households out of fuel poverty over the next few years. I urge my right hon. Friend to look at the White Paper, because we are determined to tackle this very real problem.

Peter Lilley: Given the time that it takes to plan and build a new nuclear power station, and the urgency of this issue, how can the Secretary of State justify 10 years of prevarication through serial reviews and consultations? Will he tell us what was so inadequate about the previous consultations that we now require yet another one? How long will it be before the first electricity from a new nuclear power station flows into the grid?

Alistair Darling: I have some sympathy with what the right hon. Gentleman says, but if he is right about that, leaving nuclear generation as a last resort which is his party's policymust be even worse. As for why we are consulting again, I urge him to read the report of the February court judgment, which explains at some length why that was necessary. I readily accepted the need for further consultation, and we are now going into a degree of detail that did not feature in the earlier consultation.
	The right hon. Gentleman is right: the process takes time. That is why I think a decision must be made one way or another this year, and why I want to consult. I accept that the issue is controversial and that hearts and minds have still to be won, but I am persuaded by the evidence that nuclear generation needs to be part of the mix. I believe that it needs to be an option. However, as the right hon. Gentleman well knows, that view is not universal, especially in his own party, and it is not shared by his party's Front Bench.

Julie Morgan: I have reservations about nuclear power. What does my right hon. Friend think about the construction of a Severn barrage, which would have major environmental hurdles to overcome but would make a huge contribution to a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions?

Alistair Darling: That proposal, too, is mentioned in the White Paper, and my hon. Friend will know that the Sustainable Development Commission was asked to examine the implications.
	The Government would like to encourage tidal power. There are environmental issues, and one that has not yet been properly addressed is the balance to be struck between the impact on, say, the River Severn and the environmental gain that would result from not putting more and more carbon into the atmosphere. Part of our problem is that the European directive does not attach enough weight to the alternative to encouraging more tidal power.
	I have a great deal of sympathy with what my hon. Friend has said. She has raised an issue of which Ministers are well aware, and I urge her to read the White Paper.

Robert Smith: The statement will not end investors' uncertainty. The delay over carbon capture and storage, yet more announcements of a competition that seems to have been announced many times before, and the very fact that the Government seem still to be attracted to nuclear generation cause uncertainty among those who wish to invest in non-nuclear carbon-free generation, because they do not know where the Government's strategy is going. The Government should give non-nuclear carbon-free generation and carbon capture and storage a real chance to develop before diverting investment from that new industry.

Alistair Darling: I do not accept what the hon. Gentleman says. Not a single generator has come to me and said I am not going to build a wind farm until I know your position on nuclear generation. I think that most generators would say that it is sensible to have a mix, and to ensure that we have renewable energy and more of it. As the hon. Gentleman is close to some Liberal Democrats who are objecting to various Scottish developments, let me add that if they are serious about wind farms, perhaps they should think again about objecting to every application that comes along.
	I believe that we should consider nuclear, gas and coal generation. As I said earlier, putting all our eggs in one basket does not make sense. I understand that the Liberal Democrats oppose nuclear generationalthough I think the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso) takes a rather different position, which is why he is no longer a spokesman on these mattersbut I suggest to the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Sir Robert Smith) that if he took a sensible view not just on climate change but on security of supply, he would recognise that it makes sense for us not to become over-dependent on imports from difficult parts of the world.

Anne Moffat: What will be the impact of the irresponsible position of the Scottish National party, which wants no new nuclear build in Scotland, on the industry, the skills base and the work force?

Alistair Darling: I think that you would stop me if I attempted to answer for the nationalists, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but I will say this. At present, more than a third of Scotland's electricity comes from nuclear generation, and there are at least 10 to 20 years of life left in one of its two nuclear power stations. One way or another, a substantial amount of Scotland's electricity will be generated by nuclear power, and as far as I know the First Minister will not be switching off his light for a third of the time to try to get himself out of that.
	Planning and section 36 consents are a devolved matter and we do not propose to change that. But let me repeat that the Scottish nationalists, who tell us that they want more renewables, object to wind farm applicationsperhaps more than anyone elseevery time they come along. One Minister in the Scottish Executive Administration opposes installation of the power line that would carry the electricity from the wind farms down to where it is consumed. The nationalists cannot go on saying no to nuclear generation and no to renewables: that is the way to switch off the lights.

Julie Kirkbride: Can we assume from the answer that the Secretary of State gave the hon. Member for East Lothian (Anne Moffat) that if any new nuclear power stations are recommissioned in the United Kingdom, they will definitely be in England rather than Scotland as a result of the devolutionary process?

Alistair Darling: No. All nuclear power stations will be decommissioned at some stage. Scotland has two nuclear power stations, due to be decommissioned in 2011 and, I believe, 2023. Torness was the second last nuclear power station to be built in this country, Sizewell being the last. My point was that the nationalists' position seemed rather contradictory, and I think that the Conservatives north of the border agree.

Gordon Prentice: Does the White Paper give any illustrative figures for the true cost of nuclear generation, including the costs of future decommissioning and radioactive waste management? Is it not a complete fantasy that the private sector will build new power stations without assurances that the Government will step in if things go wrong?

Alistair Darling: I can see that my hon. Friend has yet to be persuaded of my argument. The answer is yes: the White Paper goes into the costs at some length, and makes it absolutely clear that the industry will have to take account of the costs of decommissioning and long-term storage.
	I have said several times that it is for the generators to come forward and make proposals relating to whatever form of generation they consider appropriate. People ask what has changed. Two or three years ago nuclear generation did not seem attractive, but more and more generators now think that it must be an option because of the economics, the carbon price, climate change and the knowledge that Governments will have to deal with it, and security of supply. As I have said, if we do not do anything we will be in grave danger of becoming over-dependent on gas from areas that can pose great difficulties, because we are subject to the sometimes unpredictable whims of foreign Governments.

Douglas Hogg: Earlier today the Prime Minister made it plain that the Government favoured a large nuclear generating capacity, and I agree with that. The Secretary of State's statement, however, told us only that the Government would seek to encourage private-sector investment. That is not the same thing. Will the Secretary of State tell us what proportion of generating capacity he thinks should be nuclear-based, and what steps he will take to encourage the private sector to make that investment?

Alistair Darling: I am sure that the Prime Minister and I are in complete agreement on that, although I was not present at Prime Minister's Question Time.
	We have made it clear that if new nuclear plant is built, it will be built in the private sector. Proposals will be presented and planning permission will be sought in the usual way. The consultation document discusses all the issues relating to waste, the economics and so on. But, as I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice), whereas in the past there was not much interest in nuclear generation, there is now a growing interest among generators who want to be sure of a proper mix and diverse energy supplies.

Jeff Ennis: A couple of years ago I had the privilege of opening a methane extraction plant in my constituency, on the site of the former Hickleton colliery. It is run by a company called Octagon Energy, and it produces enough electricity in my constituency to power 5,000 homes for the next 20 years. Can my right hon. Friend reassure me that plants such as that will be able to qualify for the same tax incentives and assistance as those producing other forms of renewable energy?

Alistair Darling: We want to encourage development of that kind. There are many examples of methane being captured to provide energy for towns or for local businesses.
	I urge my hon. Friend to look at the results of the consultation, and at the banding. We want to encourage various forms of energy generation to ensure that there is diversity, and that we can recycle as much as possible. I hope that my hon. Friend will find that helpful.

Henry Bellingham: Is the Secretary of State aware that there are now 500 offshore wind turbines either under construction on, or planned for, sites in the Wash or off the Norfolk coast? They are less intermittent than onshore turbines, and they have critical mass and carry huge public support, in stark contrast to the various applications for sporadic onshore sites, which are far less efficient, do huge environmental damage and are universally unpopular. What can we do to get these onshore turbines offshore?

Alistair Darling: The first thing that the hon. Gentleman could do is tell the Conservative members of Swale borough council to withdraw their objection to the cable that links the offshore wind farm on the Thames to the land where the electricity will be used. He could help me in that, as he probably has more influence with them than I do. However, he makes a serious point. Offshore wind farms have a great deal of potential because there might be fewer objections. Of course, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and others might have concerns, but we were able to address them in respect of London Array and other offshore wind farms. We have to face up to the fact that offshore wind farms can be as controversial as onshore ones. However, I would like there to be more renewable energy. Our country is not as far advanced as it should be on that; we are seventh in the world, but we should be higher. As every little helps, if the hon. Gentleman could have a word with the good people of Swale, I would be most grateful.

Denis Murphy: Is my right hon. Friend aware that an application has recently been made to build a clean-coal power station in my constituency? It will be a 2 billion project that will burn in excess of 6 million tonnes of coal per year. Sadly, all that coal will be imported even though the site of that power station sits on top of the great northern coalfield where in excess of 500 million tonnes of coal await exploitation. Does my right hon. Friend not think that we should be burning that coal?

Alistair Darling: I would like our reserves in this country to be recovered and burned. However, the Government cannot tell generators that they must burn UK coal and that they cannot burn imported coal; the generators must reach decisions on that. There is a lot of coal in this country that is still available to be mined. That is a resource and we should consider exploiting it, especially as we are sometimes increasingly concerned about the difficulty in importing coal and gas. I would like British coal to be mined where that is environmentally acceptable and economically viable.

Vincent Cable: When the price of carbon and electricity falls to such a level that private nuclear generators can no longer cover their costs, can the private investors expect to be rescued as was the case in respect of British Energy four years ago, or will they become insolvent?

Alistair Darling: No, as with other electricity generation we believe that those are commercial decisions for the generators to take. They have to plan ahead and take many things into account. However, I think that it is more likely that the carbon price will increase.

Sandra Osborne: In a welcome move, the Secretary of State set up the coal forum to inform future policy on the contribution that UK coal could make to a balanced energy policy, but he does not appear to have taken up its suggestion on a statement of need in relation to the role of UK-produced coal in the future. If that is the case, why has he not done so? As he knows, the coal industry is important in my constituency. What comfort can it take that its needs have been recognised in the White Paper?

Alistair Darling: Let me add to what I said in reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Mr. Murphy). We want to encourage the extraction of UK coal where that is economic and environmentally acceptable. We looked at the question of a statement of need; as my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Sandra Osborne) knows, we have been discussing that in the coal forum for some time. There are tensions in various parts of the country, especially in relation to open-cast mining between people who want to recover more coal and those who have well established objections to open cast. We have tried to strike a balance on that. As I have said, I hope that we can continue to extract UK coal because that adds to the general mix and balance. We looked at the statement of need and we thought that it would not help in this regard, but I hope that what is in the White Paper does help.

Michael Weir: Speaking on behalf of the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru, I can say that there is much in the energy White Paper that we can support, particularly on renewables and energy efficiency. Indeed, we believe that energy efficiency should be given the highest priority. However, there is a large white elephant in the room in the form of nuclear power. It will come as no surprise to the Secretary of State that the majority of people in Scotland oppose nuclear power, and the Scottish Government will not allow the building of any new nuclear power stations in our country. The Secretary of State has also rightly said that for the foreseeable future we will have to continue to burn a lot of fossil fuels. I note what he said about carbon capture, but by my reckoning this is the sixth time that that has been announced, so why cannot he just press ahead with the Peterhead project, which is up and ready to go? Could he also tell us

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I cannot allow the hon. Member to make a statement, especially as we have already been addressing this matter for 45 minutes.

Alistair Darling: On the Peterhead plant, I know that the leader of the Scottish National party has a particular interest because it is in his constituency, but the Government cannot simply plump for one project without giving other people who are equally interested, and who also have plans, a chance to put forward their proposals. The nationalists' position on nuclear power is muddled. I noticed yesterday that their energy spokesman could not even say whether the existing nuclear ought to continue. I would have thought that that should be absolutely clear. In relation to the future, I have already said that the Scottish Executive have devolved powers, and we are not proposing to change that. I agree with the hon. Gentleman's point on renewable energy, but he cannot have it both ways. His party has been talking about local referendums for wind farms. It also objects to almost as many applications as are made, and it objects to power lines. It cannot have it both ways. It says no to nuclear, but it also says no to renewables. It must adapt from being in opposition; it is now the Administration in Edinburgh and it should show that it knows how to stand up and take decisions.

Bob Blizzard: Britain is the windiest country in Europe. My right hon. Friend's Department has identified many sites around our coasts for offshore wind farms, which can make a major contribution towards achieving the 20 per cent. target in respect of renewable energy, but too many such developments are bogged down in the long and tedious consent process and some are facing real obstacles. What is there in the White Paper that will help those developments to proceed, through streamlining the consent process and removing some of the obstacles?

Alistair Darling: The best place to refer my hon. Friend is the planning White Paper that was published on Monday. Attention has been focused on big infrastructure projects such as airports and nuclear power stations. It takes far too long to get consent for wind farms; far too many different sorts of consents need to be obtained. That is why I hope that all the Members of all parties who say that they want there to be more renewable energymore wind farms, both onshore and offshorewill back the proposals in the planning White Paper that would make that possible.

Nigel Dodds: In terms of today's White Paper, I am sure that the Secretary of State will want to confirm the importance that he attaches to inputs from the devolved Administrations and regions of the kingdom. Does he have any particular plans to improve the dialogue and liaison between his Department and the devolved Governments and other areas as we move matters forward in the coming months?

Alistair Darling: First, let me congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his new role. I want there to be close relationships between the devolved Administrations and ourselves. As was the case last week in advance of the announcement on post offices, this week in advance of the announcement on energy I or my ministerial colleagues spoke to Ministers of the devolved Administrationsor offered them the opportunity to speak in one case. It is important on matters such as energy, in which we all have an interest, that we all work together.

Several hon. Members: rose

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I am afraid that we must move on. There will be other opportunities to pursue this matter.

Point of Order

Clive Efford: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Earlier today in Prime Minister's Question Time the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) referred to St. Mary's hospital. I think that he meant Queen Mary's hospital. He said that it might be closed. However, there are no plans

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Mr. Speaker has made it clear on several occasions that we must not use points of order for the continuation of debate. If the hon. Member feels that the record needs to be corrected, there are other ways in which he can attempt to do that.

BILL PRESENTED

Constitutional Reform

Mr. Graham Allen presented a Bill to provide for the drawing up of a written constitution for the United Kingdom; for its consideration by the people and Parliament of the United Kingdom; and for connected purposes: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on 19 October, and to be printed [Bill 114].

Media (Transparency and Disclosure)

Gary Streeter: I beg to move,
	That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require media organisations to disclose certain information about any payments made by them to individuals for the contribution of those individuals to articles or broadcasts in which they are involved; and for connected purposes.
	It is important that Britain retains a robust and free press. It is one of the safeguards of our constitutional freedoms and part of the mature framework of checks and balances that keeps us safe from tyranny. Many of the countries to which I travel in my work for the Westminster Foundation for Democracy would give their right arm to have an independent and rigorous press like ours. Yet there are occasions when the great British media overstep the mark and throw around their unprecedented power to influence and shape events and their ability to make or break careers and lives, without exercising proper responsibility or accountability. Too often, media stories are fabricated, exaggerated or sensationalised; too often, there are hidden agendas; and too often, we do not know enough about the integrity or motivation of the primary source of a story. In particular, we do not know whether anybody was paid for that story.
	It would be a big jobpossibly beyond the scope of any party, Government or Act of Parliamentto put the media back in their box without damaging their essential freedom and the modest measure I bring forward today does not attempt to do any such thing. My Bill is designed to deal only with the fact that the reader or listener or viewer is rarely told whether a source of information for a story was paid, and if so, how much. Why is that relevant? Imagine the situation in a courtroom where a judge or jury is trying to assess the evidence in a complex set of facts. Imagine the sudden revelation in court that a crucial eye witness has been paid for his evidence by the defence. That evidence would be immediately discounted: nobody would believe a word that witness said, even if they had been telling the truthbecause concern over a possible mercenary motivation would rightly undermine confidence in the reliability of the testimony.
	Why is it different in the media? In a story about an alleged neighbour from hell, a bullying boss or an unfaithful wife, I want to know if the neighbour, the employee or the husbandthe persons making the colourful allegationshave been paid for their stories. Why? Because it will help me to decide what weight to give to their evidence. It will help me to make a better informed decision about motivation and veracity and whether the subject of the allegations should rightly be the object of my distrust and scorn. Ah, people argue, but this is not a court of law, this is simply a story on the TV or in the press. It is just harmless entertainment. But it is not entertainment for the hapless target of that storycountless dozens of them everyday, both celebrities and ordinary people alike, the victims of cheque-book journalism. What about the law of defamation, surely that can be used to protect people? It is an expensive exercise and beyond the means of all but the very rich to sue a mighty media organisation for libel, with no legal aid being available. Even stories that are horribly distorted and lampoon people unfairly can contain a modicum of truth, sufficient to enable the media's sharp-suited lawyers to bat away all but the most determined of litigants.
	Sadly, the Press Complaints Commission is of little use. More often than not, it reveals itself to be a toothless tiger and a self-congratulatory organisation that persistently fails those who seek its assistance. That means that the print press in particular is effectively free of regulation, despite the enormous power it wields over the perceptions we hold of the events and individuals that shape our lives. That is not a new problem. Even the military dictator Napoleon Bonaparte observed ruefully:
	Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
	The pen is truly mightier than the sword when it is wielded by the media.
	I am not saying that the media should not pay for stories. I am not saying that people should not accept payment for selling their stories to the press. I am simply saying that the viewer or the reader or the listener should be told whether money has changed hands to put that story together, and if so how much. In this age of maximum disclosure and transparency, is it reasonable that the reader should any longer be denied that crucial information? My belief in more media disclosure is only one reason why I do not support the Bill that passed through this House last Friday, and I very much hope that it falls in the other place.
	I was interested to see in  The Mail on Sunday on 29 April 2007 that at the end of an article entitled, We loved each other like older people do, a disclaimer appeared stating that
	Valerie Beech has received no payment for this interview.
	If  The Mail on Sunday believes that information to be relevant when no money has been paid for a story, why is it not relevant when money has been paid? Why not force all media by law to make that clear every time? Compare that example to the recent Lord Brown case. Was it right that it had to be dragged screaming and kicking from Associated Newspapers, days after the allegations about his private life were first unveiled, that his former friend Jeff Chevalier was paid substantial sums of money by Associated Newspapers over a significant period of time for his story? Surely, the very first time that that story broke we, the public, were entitled to be told that tens of thousands of pounds in cash or kind were paid to extract that expression of grief from a jilted lover.
	We live in an age when the media is immensely powerful. It can make or break careers and lives. The media have much more influence on Government policy, on how the country is run, than a humble Back Bencher like me. Indeed, the media have more influence than most junior Ministers. The rules for transparency and disclosure for elected representatives are stringent, and rightly so. We go on an overseas trip to view poverty in Malawi paid for by a charity and we are hounded if we do not disclose that fact. Sometimes, we hound each other over such trivial matters, and that is an issue on which we should all reflect.
	Remember the outrage that was rightly expressed in the media when it emerged years ago that at least one of our colleagues was willing to accept cash to ask questions in this House? We rightly took the view that such mercenary motivation was not to be tolerated in the nation's Parliament. However, we have this powerful beast prowling around our country trashing lives and pronouncing their judgments and the reader does not have the first idea about how their stories were obtained and how much blood money was paid for the destruction of a reputation. It is time to bring that to an end. It is time for more transparency.
	Naturally, the media must be allowed to protect its sources, and that is a principle we should respect. My Bill does not demand the disclosure of the source's identity, simply a sentence at the end of each broadcast or article stating whether or not the cheque book had been used, and if so how much. Then, the reader could make a better informed judgment about whether or not the story should be believed.
	There is a particular problem, which I do not have time fully to consider today, and it relates to the police. Many sensational headlines emanate from some police officers who, within five minutes of a celebrity arrest, are apparently on the phone to their favourite reporter shopping the person concerned for casha person who is innocent until proved guilty, as we should remember. It happens every day. The editor of  The Sun, Rebekah Wade, in her evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on 11 March 2003, admitted that newspapers pay the police for stories. Often that is illegal, but whether it is or not, the reader should be told when it happens. Perhaps that is a problem that should be tackled through other means.
	The eminent editor of  The Guardian newspaper, C. P. Scott, wrote in 1921 that
	Comment is free, but facts are sacred.
	That is a seminal statement of the values of a free press. Somewhere along the journey from 1921 to today, that concept of a news media in which facts are sacred has mutated into entertainment is king, and on that modern altar, private lives and public reputations are sacrificed for 24 hours of amusement and titillation. The spirit of C. P. Scott has been lost and with it trust in that vital and serious pillar of our democracy. I believe that my Bill, far from harming the media, can help to restore lost confidence in a noble profession.
	Let us celebrate the robust and vivid character of the fourth estate, but let the media be sensational and responsible in equal measure. Let them work within the framework of disclosure and transparency with which all of the rest of us have to comply. Let us be tolddid they pay for that story, and if so, how much? I commend my Bill to the House.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Gary Streeter, Angela Browning, Sir George Young, Dr. Tony Wright, Mr. Frank Field, Mr. Tom Clarke, Mr. Colin Breed, Mr. David Curry, Mrs. Janet Dean, Mr. David Burrowes, Mr. Greg Pope and Ms Karen Buck.

Media (transparency and Disclosure)

Mr. Gary Streeter accordingly presented a Bill to require media organisations to disclose certain information about any payments made by them to individuals for the contribution of those individuals to articles or broadcasts in which they are involved; and for connected purposes: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 19 October, and to be printed [Bill 111].

Opposition Day
	  
	[12th allotted day]

Scottish Parliamentary Elections

Mr. Deputy Speaker: We now come to the main business. The first of the Opposition motions is about an independent inquiry into the conduct of the Scottish elections. I must inform the House that Mr. Speaker has selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

David Mundell: I beg to move,
	That this House considers that the rejection of 146,097 votes in the constituency and regional elections to the Scottish Parliament, the equivalent of over 1,000,000 in a UK general election, to be totally unacceptable and an affront to democracy; notes that the number of rejected ballots exceeds the winning majority in several constituencies and that different formats of the regional ballot paper were used in different parts of Scotland; further notes that serious concerns have been raised about the issuing of postal ballots for the elections and the electronic equipment and processes used for counting votes; further notes that repeated advice not to hold the local government elections under the newly introduced single transferable vote system on the same day as the Scottish Parliament elections was ignored by the Scotland Office and the then Scottish Executive; calls upon the Secretary of State for Scotland to accept responsibility for the failures in the conduct of the Scottish Parliament elections and to apologise to the people of Scotland; further notes that the Electoral Commission is to carry out an inquiry, but considers that such an inquiry should be independent of the Commission, which had a significant role in the conduct of the elections, if public confidence in the electoral process in Scotland is to be restored; and accordingly further calls upon the Government, working in conjunction with the Scottish Executive, to instigate such an inquiry.
	It would be remiss of me not to use this first opportunity to congratulate the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) on his appointment as First Minister of Scotland and to wish him and his new Scottish Executive well as they discharge the responsibilities devolved to the Scottish Parliament. As I have said before, I believe that the Secretary of State for Scotland will rue the Government's failure over eight years to put in place appropriate mechanisms for dialogue and interaction between London and Edinburgh. However, that debate is for another day. I understand that today the First Minister is expected to make a statement on his programme for government. I shall watch with interest to see whether he makes any reference to the conduct of the Scottish elections, given his previous support for an independent inquiry.
	The House will recall the statement by the Secretary of State on 8 May about the conduct of the Scottish parliamentary elections. That statement proved to be wholly inadequate, not least because the Secretary of State failed to take responsibility for the conduct of the elections. He also failed to give the apology to the people of Scotland that I, and many on both sides of the House, demanded. I could not have agreed more with the hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Devine) when he described the conduct of the elections as an embarrassment and added:
	we owe the people of Scotland an apology.[ Official Report, 8 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 33.]
	That apology is still not forthcoming. Instead, the Secretary of State has sought to use the Jack McConnell approach to the cost of the Scottish Parliament: everybody is to blame, so nobody is to blame.

Bob Blizzard: The Secretary of State has already initiated an independent inquiry into this matter. Does not the Conservative party's choice of the subject of the Scottish elections have more to do with wishing to avoid its war about education and grammar schools, the issue of the patient's passport, which is set to be ditched, and the issue of the economy? The only thing that the hon. Gentleman's side could reasonably say would be, Well done Labour!

David Mundell: If the hon. Gentleman believes that the Government have set up an independent inquiry, he is mistaken. They have not; they have referred the matter to the Electoral Commission. We regard this debate as one about an issue of great importance to the people of Scotland.
	During questions on his statement, the Secretary of State seemed to suggest that the then figure of 100,000, cited in the media as representing the number of rejected ballots in the Scottish elections, was too high. In fact, the figure turned out to be too low, by nearly 50,000there were 146,097 rejected ballots, the equivalent of 1 million in a UK general election. If that is not an important issue and an affront to democracy, I do not know what is.

Ian Davidson: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that some papers were deemed to have been spoilt because the first, single-Member ballot space was blank? That need not have been a mistake. Voters for the Green party, the two Trotskyist parties or the two religious extremist parties might have decided not to vote in the first-past-the-post section because there was no candidate for them.

David Mundell: I agree that there is a differentiation to be made between spoilt and rejected ballot papers. One thing on which Members across the House will agree is that the guidance to returning officers on what is a rejected ballot paper must be much clearer.
	Since the Secretary of State's statement, further information about the use of different ballot paper formats in different regions of Scotland has come into the public domain. We Conservatives believe that the case for a fully independent inquiry is now even more compelling if public confidence is to be restored in the democratic process in Scotland.

Jim Devine: I seem to remember that in the 8 May debate, the hon. Gentleman conceded that he acceded to the single ballot paper.

David Mundell: I conceded that the Conservatives did not object to the single ballot paper. However, I said that we made it absolutely clear that the ballot paper should not be used on the same day as another ballot paper on which people were encouraged to make more than one mark. That is clear.
	Today's debate is a further opportunity for Members to highlight their concerns. It is also an opportunity for responsibility to be taken and an apology to be made. We do not seek to score political points, but there are clearly deep concerns on both sides of the House. We are not calling for the elections to be rerun; nor are we calling for the Secretary of State's head, as others may have doneat least not yet. We simply want the Government to accept responsibility for the debacle on 3 May. They should apologise for it to the people of Scotland and hold a full and comprehensive inquiry, independent of the Electoral Commission and other stakeholders.

Tom Clarke: On that point, I think that the hon. Gentleman accepts that the Electoral Commission has responsibilities that it is now carrying out, and it has gone a bit further in by involving Mr. Gould. However, the hon. Gentleman specifically asks the House to support the appointment of an independent inquiry. No doubt he has costed that, so will he say what would be the cost and who would bear it? Would it be Westminster or the Scottish Executive?

David Mundell: As the right hon. Gentleman will know, any costs would be a subject for the discussionsnow regular, I understandbetween the Scottish Executive and the UK Government. To date, the debacle has cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds. The matter must be put right if we are to restore integrity and confidence in the electoral system in Scotland.

Angus Robertson: May I ask for clarification from the Conservative Front Bench? The issue is important. The Conservative party motion calls for the UK Government to initiate an independent inquiry. The hon. Gentleman said that he would welcome the initiation of something by the Scottish Executive, and the First Minister has pledged that. Why does the hon. Gentleman want the UK Government to initiate a parallel inquiry?

David Mundell: As the hon. Gentleman knows but may not accept, the UK Government are responsible for the conduct of the Scottish elections and the Scottish Parliament is responsible for the conduct of the local elections. My view, and that of my party, is that this Parliament and the Scottish Executive should work together, and not in conflict, on such issues.
	As I was saying, the purpose of such an inquiry would be to determine why so many electors were disfranchised from having their votes counted, why there were significant delays in the issuing of postal votes and why the arrangements for the counting of votes were so unsatisfactory. Most importantly, we want to ensure that this ludicrous situation is never allowed to happen again, in Scotland or anywhere else in the United Kingdom. I am thinking of the operational aspects of the elections and the holding of two elections on the same day under completely different voting systems.

Alistair Carmichael: Has the hon. Gentleman seen the briefing prepared for today's debate by the Electoral Commission? It outlines the terms of reference and method for the inquiry that Ron Gould has been asked to undertake. Will the hon. Gentleman indicate for the benefit of the House whether he would add anything to the terms of that inquiry?

David Mundell: That the Electoral Commission issued that document at least restores my faith in the impact of Parliament in requiring the production of that information. The hon. Gentleman does not understand the point of our motion, however. The point of this debate is that we want the inquiry to be independent of the Electoral Commission.

Andrew Robathan: People keep referring to the Electoral Commission and many of us have observed its work since it was first established. I am sure that Sam Younger is a very nice manI have had long chats with him. However, Sir Alistair Graham, appointed by the Government to look after standards in public life, criticised the
	lack of courage, competence and leadership
	in the Commission's regulatory and advisory approach and said that it
	should have shown greater focus and courage in alerting the risk to the integrity of the electoral process from legislative changes.
	He went on to recommend a change in statute to streamline and refocus the Electoral Commission. That is the point: the Electoral Commission does not have a good record, which is why we want an independent inquiry.

David Mundell: I thank my hon. Friend for that contribution. A further, specific point is that the Electoral Commission was a key stakeholder in the process and played an instrumental part in the design of the ballot paper.
	Nobody can argue that a 700 per cent. increase in the number of rejected ballots since the last Scottish parliamentary election is acceptable. There can be little doubt that the changes in the conduct of the election had a detrimental impact on the ability of electors to have their vote counted. The report on the London mayoral election, reinforced by the Arbuthnott commission, showed that that was entirely predictable if two elections using different voting systems were held on the same day, especially when both ballot papers were in a new format. I and others raised that issue with the Secretary of State and his predecessor on numerous occasions, but the response was always to brush aside such concerns and carry on regardless.
	There is no evidence that any one political party or candidate was disproportionately disadvantaged by the number of rejected ballots, but it cannot be satisfactory that the number of rejected ballots exceeded the winning candidate's majority in more than 20 per cent. of constituency contests. In Edinburgh East and Musselburgh, for example, there were a massive 2,521 rejected ballots compared with a majority of 1,382. If rejected ballots had been a registered party in Glasgow Shettleston, it would have come third, with 2,035 votesabout 12.1 per cent. of the total votes cast.
	Such figures strike at the heart of the United Kingdom's reputation for the conduct of elections, which was an example of best practice to the rest of the world before the Labour Government began meddling with the electoral process. Compared with many countries throughout the world that want to hold democratic elections, Scotland and the UK have the expertise and technology needed to conduct elections in a successful and professional manner, but only when the advice of professionals is taken and adhered to.
	It is self-evident that the Electoral Commission has a duty to report on elections and its statutory review of the Scottish elections is welcomebut as part of a wider public inquiry, not instead of it. The basic premise of natural justice dictates that the same organisation should not be responsible for all lines of investigation when, as I have said, it played a significant role in the elections; in particular, setting out recommendations for the design of the single ballot. The Electoral Commission employed Cragg Ross Dawson to undertake research that was used as a basis for deciding on a single ballot paper. It could certainly be argued that the commission put an over-positive gloss on that report in its letter of early August, seemingly omitting to disclose the finding that the single paper option was more likely to lead to errors, and thus contribute to a higher number of invalid votes. If the Secretary of State has actually read the report, perhaps he will use this opportunity to clear up the media speculation in that regard.
	The Electoral Commission also ran the Vote Scotland campaign jointly with the then Labour and Liberal Democrat Scottish Executive to ensure that people knew how to vote correctly. Before the elections, the commission repeatedly appeared in the media to reassure people about the process, especially the issuing of postal votes. Only an inquiry that is not conducted at the behest of a stakeholder will satisfy the desire for an impartial investigation into how many people were disfranchised.

David Hamilton: No one would disagree that a debacle took place on election day, but I think the professionals created the problem, so it would be very unwise to say it was all the Electoral Commission. The matter is going to the Electoral Commission, so we should see what happens before we take the next step. I do not accept that people were not disadvantaged by the situation; parties must have won when they should not have won. Perhaps the easiest thing would be to go back to the Conservative policyfirst past the post across the board for both local government and Scottish Parliament elections.

David Mundell: In the new spirit in Scotland of parties working together, perhaps my party could discuss that issue with Labour. I was surprised that Mr. McConnell succumbed to Liberal Democrat demands to introduce the single transferable vote, when combined Conservative and Labour votes in the Scottish Parliament at the time could have defeated the proposal.

Alistair Carmichael: The hon. Gentleman has to explain to the House why he concludes that just because Ron Gould has been appointed by the Electoral Commission he cannot be independent of the commission. Is the hon. Gentleman saying that there is some connection between Mr. Gould and the Electoral Commission that puts a question over his impartiality or independence? If he cannot provide such evidence, the logic of his position is that if the Scotland Office appoints somebody to conduct an inquiry, that person will not be independent either.

David Mundell: The hon. Gentleman and his party made it clear in their amendment, which was not accepted, that they support the role of the Electoral Commission in that process: we do not. We believe that the inquiry should be independent of the commission because it is a principal stakeholder in the process.  [ Interruption. ] I have made that as emphatically clear as I possibly can.
	As I said before, although the Conservatives did not oppose the introduction of a single ballot, we never agreed to its use on the same day as another ballot paper on which the making of more than one mark was actively encouraged.

Jo Swinson: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

David Mundell: No, not at this point.
	Voters were told that they had two votes, but it appears that a large number of them interpreted that information as the need to mark two crosses in one column instead of one in each column, thereby rendering their vote invalid in each election. Is that really surprising when the explanation of the STV system was that it gave people more than one vote?
	Any inquiry must also address whether the use of candidate names in party descriptions for the regional vote may have misled voters into thinking they were voting for their preferred constituency candidate.

Stewart Hosie: The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. However, he will be aware that all the names on the ballot paper were sanctioned in advance and all party names were ratified. He says that people may have been misled. Will he consider the language he is using?

David Mundell: If the hon. Gentleman listens, he will hear me say that some people argue that it was a political masterstroke for the Scottish National party to designate itself as Alex Salmond for First Minister, but the question is whether the appearance of that designation on the top left of ballot papers was a cause for confusion. Whoever conducts the inquiry, they must address that issue.

Several hon. Members: rose

David Mundell: I must make some progress because we have a limited time for the debate.
	There can be little doubt that the presentation of candidate names and party logos was compromised on many ballot papers. There was an attempt to accommodate the names of too many candidates on a defined size of ballot paper. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the elderly and people with sight problems, in particular, struggled with the instructions. Worse still, ballot papers issued at polling stations in Glasgow and Lothian did not resemble the sample papers previously shown to parties. It is a fundamental tenet of our democracy that a person voting in Shetland, for example, has the same format of ballot as a fellow citizen voting in Linlithgow. It is now clear that ballot papers across Scotland lacked uniformity. We regard that as entirely unacceptableon a par with Florida's hanging chads.
	As I voted in Moffat, I naively assumed that people voting in Edinburgh or Glasgow would be presented with the same form of ballot paper, but I was wrong. In the regions of Glasgow and Lothian, ballot papers had different instructions from ballot papers in other areas of Scotland. The arrows telling people in which columns to put their crosses were removed. Not surprisingly, those two regions recorded the highest number of rejected ballots: a staggering 7.85 per cent. in Glasgow and 5.2 per cent. in the Lothians. Only an independent inquiry can get to the bottom of those kinds of decisions.
	We need to know from the Secretary of State how decisions were made on the final design and layout of ballot papers. Did he see the final variations in the ballot papers for all constituencies and regions across Scotland? Did he sign off the decision to remove the instructional arrows from the ballot papers in the Glasgow and Lothian regions? More importantly, what level of consultation did he undertake with political parties, candidates, returning officers, DRS and the Electoral Commission before making the decision? Why did he give precedence to the electronic counting process rather than to candidates and electors? I have no doubt that if market research had been undertaken on the final ballots, they would have been rejected outrighthad the research documentation been read by the Secretary of State.
	No doubt the use of e-counting in the elections played a major role in the decisions to change ballot papers. Electronic counting was introduced as a means to an end. It was adopted initially, it was said, to shorten the amount of time taken to count local ballots, because counting votes manually under the new STV system would take days rather than hours. But it is quite clear that e-counting became a means in itself in Edinburgh and Glasgow, where, instead of altering the ballot papers by deleting instructional information, there should have been a manual count if the machines could not cope.
	The willingness to change fundamental aspects of the election process to suit the needs of electronic counting and DRSits operatorhas compromised the integrity of the electoral process. We must ask ourselves the serious question of whether, after these events, e-counting can give everyone the confidence that the election count is being carried out appropriately. Many candidates complained in the media that they had no idea of the outcome of their election until a few minutes before it was announcedunlike what happens with the traditional hand count.
	May I deal briefly with postal ballots? Every right hon. and hon. Member from Scotland will have heard from constituents who were unable to vote owing to the late arrival of postal ballots. That is simply administrative incompetence striking at the heart of the democratic process. We may never know how many electors were disfranchised by the postal vote debacle, which saw probably hundreds of people unable to return their ballots in time. It is ironic that postal votes arrived on polling day and that the only way to make them count was to take them to the polling stationif the elector was lucky enough to be at home to receive that vote. The Government have always known about, and encouraged, the trend of more and more people opting for a postal vote. The election date was hardly a surprise and there is no excuse for not putting arrangements in place to guarantee that, at least from an administrative perspective, postal voters received their postal ballots on time.
	There can be no doubt that the Government had a genuine opportunity to work with the Scottish Executive to reduce the possibility of voter confusion. The key to that would have been to decouple the two elections, as many people advocated. That is the view not just of the Conservatives or the newly appointed Scottish Executive, but of the Government's own Arbuthnott commission, which recommended it. The Electoral Commission made the scale of the difficulties clear during the evidence that it gave to the Local Government and Transport Committee of the Scottish Parliament. The Arbuthnott commission summed up the arguments perfectly, saying that holding the elections on separate days would
	reduce the complexity of voting, potentially reduce voter confusion and keep the number of invalid votes to a minimum. It would also reduce administrative complexity in the planning, management and counting of the elections, and enhance the transparency of the electoral process, especially allowing attention to be focussed on local issues.
	It is ridiculous of the Secretary of State and his predecessor to argue that only the Scottish Executive were responsible for the date of the local government elections, when obviously holding those elections on the same day would have an impact on the Scottish Parliament elections. He may have no influence with the Scottish Executive now, but he did then. When I was a Member of the Scottish Parliament, I introduced the Local Government Elections Bill to do just what I have been talking about, but Labour and Liberal Democrat Scottish Ministers thwarted constant attempts to get the Bill through. Conservatives in the Scottish Parliament will continue to pursue the cause and will look to the new Scottish Executive for support this time around.
	The high level of rejected ballot papers in the local council counts compared with the last electionsthe level almost tripledis also unacceptable. The system is certainly not the great triumph that the Electoral Reform Society or the Liberal Democrats would have us believe. The confusion, in terms of which councillor does what, has not even begun. Even if STV is accepted, what can be the purpose of holding such elections on the same day if, as was shown in the London mayoral elections and voting in Northern Ireland, having two separate systems in operation always exposes us to the risk of a disproportionately large number of people having their ballots rejected?

Ian Davidson: Does the hon. Gentleman agree with the proposal that the investigation should also look at the impact of alphabetical position on candidates' success rates and at the impact of not grouping candidates from the same party together on the ballot paper? Those issues are an important aspect of the review, but they have not been included so far.

David Mundell: The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. All the flaws of the STV system, which the Liberal Democrats advocate again today, were highlighted at the time of the introduction of the process in the Scottish Parliament. Just as Rhodri Morgan in Wales appears to be willing to accept that sort of arrangement, Labour in the Scottish Parliament accepted the introduction of STV.
	Whatever our view of the outcome, the conduct of the Scottish elections cannot be described as a success in any way, shape or form. That was and is the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Scotland and no amount of trying to divide up the blame can hide that. It is time to take responsibility and to apologise.
	Our motion sets out a basis on which to restore confidence and faith in our electoral system not just in Scotland, but throughout the United Kingdom. We want the serious issues that arose at these elections to be exhaustively investigated, independently of all stakeholders responsible for conducting them. We also want proper consideration to be given to decoupling the Scottish parliamentary and local council elections, to reduce both the possibility of voter confusion and the number of rejected ballots. I urge the House to support the motion.

Douglas Alexander: I beg to move, To leave out from House to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
	'notes that a statutory review of the Scottish Parliament elections is already underway conducted by the Electoral Commission as required by Parliament; further notes that, at the prior request of the then Scottish Executive, this review will also cover the Scottish local government elections; welcomes the appointment of an international authority on the management and organisation of elections, Mr Ron Gould, the former Assistant Chief Electoral Officer of Canada, to lead the review; further notes that his terms of reference include examining the role of the Electoral Commission in the preparation of the elections, as well as matters relating to postal ballot delays, the high number of rejected ballots, combining Scottish local government and Scottish parliamentary elections, and the electronic counting process; and believes that this statutory review which is now in progress should complete its report in order to inform decisions in relation to any further steps which may be necessary or appropriate.'.
	The substance of today's debate is not whether lessons will be learned or answers will be given in the light of the difficulties encountered in the Scottish elections, but how that process will happen. In the days following 3 May, there were calls for a whole variety of inquiries and reviews. Some called for a judicial inquiry, while others called for a committee of inquiry that should be chaired by an international political figure, such as former President Mary Robinson. The Conservative motion calls for yet another form of inquiry: a joint exercise with the Scottish Executive. Let me thus begin by reiterating the Government's stated position.
	We have never suggested that we will not countenance further inquiries. Instead, we argue that it is right on balance to let the statutory review led by Ron Gould report before deciding on the next steps. The motion calls for an independent review of the conduct of the Scottish elections. It also calls on me, as Secretary of State for Scotland, to accept responsibility and to apologise to the people of Scotland. As I will set out, a review is in progress that is independent of the Government and headed by an international authority on elections. As Secretary of State, I accept responsibility for the actions and decisions of the Scotland Office. If the review finds fault with those actions and decisions, I will, of course, apologise.
	The House established the independent Electoral Commission and gave it the duty through legislation to carry out statutory reviews of elections. As I indicated in exchanges following my statement to the House on 8 May, and again in a written answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen, South (Miss Begg) last Friday, only when we have the report can decisions on the next steps be best taken, in the light of the commission's findings.

Brian H Donohoe: Will the Secretary of State confirm that we will have a chance to debate the report when it is presented to Parliament? What input will Members of Parliament have in the review itself?

Douglas Alexander: Of course, it is for the usual channels to determine the debates that take place in the House. However, let me reiterate a point that I made in my statement: the House will of course be updated at the conclusion of the review. Technically, the review will go to the Scottish Executive, the Scotland Office and electoral returning officers, but we will ensure that it is made available to all hon. Members. My hon. Friend asks how Members of Parliament can set out their views to the review. I certainly hope that Mr. Gould will take cognisance of this debate. It remains open to any hon. Member to provide evidence or information to the review as it undertakes its work.

Ann McKechin: Under the terms of the review, I note that the Electoral Commission welcomes the views of members of the public. May I suggest that it needs to do much more than that? It should take direct evidence from voters of all relevant ethnic, socio-economic and gender groups to ensure that we get a true representation of what voters think about the process.

Douglas Alexander: My hon. Friend makes an important point. Of course, it is not for me to prescribe the format of the independent review. However, I take heart from the fact that the further information that was provided on the terms of the review at the beginning of this week indicated that there would be an opportunity for public meetings to be held. I certainly hope that a wide cross-section of people will have the opportunity to provide evidence and opinions to the review.

Oliver Heald: So is the right hon. Gentleman's point that he does not think that he or his colleagues in the Scottish Executive owe the people of Scotland an apology at the moment, and that only if the report says so will he be prepared to come to the Dispatch Box to say sorry for 140,000 people losing their votes?

Douglas Alexander: May I offer the hon. Gentleman the opportunity to correct the factual error that he made in claiming that 140,000 people lost their votes? As I will demonstrate during my speech, if he was familiar with the situation in Scotland he would realise that he could not make that claim before the House with any authority.
	The hon. Gentleman's intervention was telling. During the speech made by the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell), I felt that opportunism was vying with statesmanshipand opportunism won. He simultaneously predetermined the outcome of the review and demanded that an independent inquiry be established, incidentally by the Government, no doubt in consort with the Scottish Executive. The problem for the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) is that after just the introductory Front-Bench speech, the Conservative party's argument, as set out in the motion, is in severe danger of collapsing under the weight of its contradictions.

Pete Wishart: The Electoral Commission has already commissioned a report for the Secretary of State by a man called Cragg Ross Dawson. That report first highlighted the difficulties with the single ballot paper. What were the Secretary of State's conclusions about that report and what did he do to address the concerns expressed?

Douglas Alexander: I am happy to answer the hon. Gentleman's questions. The Cragg Ross Dawson report was produced not by an individual, but by a company. It was commissioned by people in the Scotland Office, who had requested that work be undertaken through the Electoral Commission. The report was sent to the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, my hon. Friend the Member for Inverclyde (David Cairns), with whom I discussed the matter. It formed part of a consultation exercise that received 28 responses, along with three further responses that, technically, arrived after the consultation had concluded. We took account of the responses when we reached our decisions. I then had the opportunity to receive from officials a summary of the conclusions of all the consultation responses that we received, including work commissioned by the Electoral Commission. I discussed the report with the Under-Secretary and officials before making decisions.
	The House established the independent Electoral Commission and gave it a duty to carry out statutory reviews of elections. As I said, only when we have sight of its report will it be appropriate to determine the next steps to take. Let me remind the House of the remit of the commission and point out why I believe that it is only sensible to let it get on with its job before deciding what further steps might be necessary.
	The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 established the Electoral Commission and tasked it with, among other things, the job of reviewing the conduct of elections and reporting back to both the Government and Parliament with its findings and recommendations. That duty was conferred on it by the House without dissent. So far, it has reported on general elections, European elections, the 2003 elections for the Scottish Parliament and elections for other devolved institutions.
	The commission's review of the 2007 Scottish parliamentary elections is under way. Before the elections, the Scottish Executive asked the commission to review, as it did in 2003, the conduct of the Scottish local government elections, for which the Executive have legislative competence. Frankly, that makes sense. The decision of the Scottish Parliament in 2002 to move the date of the local government elections so that they could be held on the same day as the parliamentary elections had the effect of synchronising the elections.

Alistair Carmichael: The Secretary of State is being generous with his time. Does he think that, with the benefit of hindsight, the House might have to accept that it got the constitution of the Electoral Commission wrong? Does he accept that the insistence on not giving any of the political parties representation on the commission is seen as one of its major weaknesses because few on the commission have hon. Members' day-to-day political experience of being involved in elections? Will he speak to Ministers with responsibility for the commission to determine whether there is any prospect of an early review of its constitution?

Douglas Alexander: The Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, East (Bridget Prentice), who is sitting on the Front Bench, assures me that consideration is being given to all those points. However, the House will understand that given the importance of the statutory review, the independence of Ron Gould and the important task that he is taking forward, it would not be appropriate for me to offer an opinion at this stage about the role and remit of the Electoral Commission. However, I say that without prejudice to the fact that the House will no doubt return to the matter in due course.

Rosemary McKenna: It is important that the review examines seriously the role of the Electoral Commission and the representation of political parties. Does my right hon. Friend agree that if the parties had been represented on the commission, there would have been little likelihood that Alex Salmond for First Minister would have been allowed as the name of a political party on the regional list?

Douglas Alexander: I was about to say, In fairness to the SNP, which is an uncharacteristic phrase to pass my lips. However, it is fair to acknowledge that, as the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale pointed out, that designation for the party was approved ahead of the elections in the standard procedures, but it would be entirely for the independent leader of the review, Ron Gould, to consider whether that is a material consideration in his review. I do not wish to prejudice his right to consider that and other matters by commenting on them today.

David Marshall: May I follow up the important point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) on the need to have public input to the review? Will my right hon. Friend consider the Scotland Office and the Scottish Executive running a joint advertising campaign to inform the public on how they can have input to the review? There is likely to be next to no public input if no one knows how to do it.

Douglas Alexander: It is not for me to prescribe the means of publicising the review, although, as I have already assured the House, I hope that those leading the review will look carefully at the comments made in today's debate. The review is to be funded through the Electoral Commission, not by the Scottish Executive or the Scotland Office, so there is no issue of budgetary constraints being exercised to prevent the public from being made aware of their opportunity to contribute to the review. It is important proactively to give people that opportunity, because when one looks at where there were the highest levels of rejected ballot papers, one sees clearly that there are some constituencies where it is important to hear the voices of people who might otherwise not have the opportunity to have their voices heard in the debate.

John Redwood: Will the Secretary of State give way?

Douglas Alexander: I wish to make a little more progress before giving way again.
	As I said, the decision of the Scottish Parliament in 2002 to move the date of the local government elections so that they were held on the same day as the parliamentary elections had the effect of synchronising the two elections. The arrangements for the synchronised elections were overseen this year by an elections steering group, chaired by Scottish Executive officials and comprising officials from the Scotland Office, the Electoral Commission, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, the Scottish Parliament and representatives of returning officers, registration officers and other election administrators. The presence of the Electoral Commission on the steering group, as well as the wider role that it played during the preparations for the elections, has prompted questions in this debate and in the discussion following my statement to the House on 8 May about the appropriateness of the commission carrying out its statutory review of the elections' conduct, notwithstanding the fact that that duty could be set aside only by fresh legislation.
	The commission has acknowledged and sought to address those concerns regarding the work of the review. In particular, it has appointed one of the world's leading experts in the conduct of the elections to lead the Scottish elections review. I welcome that appointment. Mr. Ron Gould, who has agreed to take on that important role, is a former assistant chief electoral officer of Canada. He has participated in more than 100 election assistance missions in more than 70 countries since 1984 and he is considered to be one of the leading world experts on the organisation and management of elections. At the time of his appointment, Mr. Gould said:
	I look forward to working with all those involved in the Scottish elections to enable us to develop a clear picture of exactly what happened and why.
	The commission's latest announcement, made on Monday 21 May, set out the details of Mr. Gould's planned approach. It has also confirmed that Mr. Gould's team does not include anybody involved in the decision-making processes associated with the Scottish elections.

John Redwood: Given the narrowness of the SNP victory both in overall seats and in several individual seats, does the Secretary of State agree that it is quite possible that the will of the Scottish people was that Labour should be the biggest party and still hold the post of First Minister, and that the large number of votes that could not be counted made that impossible?

Douglas Alexander: I did not make that claim in my previous statement and I will certainly not make it today. As in every other election, it is open to individual candidates who wish to challenge the veracity of a constituency result to do so by means of a petition to the electoral courtthere is a period in which such an approach may be made. It is not for me to comment on individual resultsthat would not be appropriate. However, in the light of the right hon. Gentleman's question, I do reflect on the fact that, had I been minded to suggest a different type of review given the closeness of the result, I would have been subjected to heavy criticism by the Opposition for not being willing to accept the decision of the Scottish electors as manifested in the constituency and regional list results that emerged from the events of 3 and 4 May.
	The Scotland OfficeMinisters and civil servantswill co-operate with Mr. Gould's review. As I have said, Mr. Gould will be able to consider the points made in this afternoon's debate, and I am sure that Members of this House will want to submit evidence to the review. Although the commission has said that it expects the review to report in the summer, the time scale will ultimately be determined by Mr. Gould, who leads the review.

Jim Sheridan: Can my right hon. Friend assure the House that Mr. Gould and the inquiry team will have the opportunity to speak with the senior management of Royal Mail? There seems to be some ambiguity about when people receivedor did not receivetheir ballot papers.

Douglas Alexander: My hon. Friend makes a fair point. One of the issues that the Electoral Commission identified for the statutory review and which I requested that the review consider is delays affecting postal ballots. It is not for me to speculate at the Dispatch Box today; I simply observe that there seem to have been different circumstances in those areas where there was difficulty with postal ballots and it seems entirely appropriate for the review team, if they are so minded, to make inquiries directly with Royal Mail, given its involvement in dispatching postal ballots.
	The commitment to impartiality demonstrated by the commission's announcement reinforces my belief that if I were to accede at this stage to the urgings of those who wish to establish a judicial or some other form of inquiry at the present time, we would be in the position of having two parallel investigations into precisely the same events examining the same issues, talking to the same people and reviewing the same decisions at the same time. That does not strike me as the most sensible course of action, particularly when the Electoral Commission has said that the review is expected to have completed its work in just over 12 weeks' time. I believe that it is better to await the report and then to take decisions informed by its findings and recommendations.
	After the elections on 3 May, I came to the House at the first available opportunity to make a statement on the conduct of the elections in the light of public concern. In that statement, I set out in detail the problems that occurred and the issues that needed to be addressed. Briefly, they are: delays in the sending out of postal ballots; difficulties with some of the electronic counting machines; the unacceptably high number of rejected ballot papers; and the decision to hold the two elections on the same day, especially given the new arrangements for local authority elections. Those matters are now being investigated by Mr. Gould and his team.
	I am aware that a number of colleagues are keen to speak today and time is short, so I shall not repeat all the detail that I set out in my statement. However, because I am sure that the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire would never intend inadvertently to misspeak in the House of Commons, I am keen to clarify exactly what I said about the number of rejected votes in the course of the exchanges following my statement. I said:
	a final tally is still to be reached on the number of spoiled papers.[ Official Report, 8 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 29.]
	At that time, the final authoritative figures were in the process of being collated. There has been much speculation about the level of rejected votesfigures of 5, 7 and 10 per cent. have been quoted in the press and elsewherebut the actual figures have now been published. Across the regional and constituency sections, 3.47 per cent. of the total votes cast in the Scottish Parliament elections were rejected. That breaks down as 60,454 rejected papers in the regional vote, representing 2.88 per cent. of the total votes cast in that section; and 85,643 rejected papers in the constituency vote, representing 4.07 per cent. of the total votes cast in that section. The level of rejected papers and the problems encountered with e-counting and the administration of postal votes are subjects of Mr. Gould's review.

Stewart Hosie: The right hon. Gentleman mentioned some of the terms of reference for the Electoral Commission's statutory review. Obviously, I would like there to be an independent review, but I nevertheless welcome the initiative whereby information officers were placed at polling stations. However, there is anecdotal evidence that in the council ballot, those officers advised people to put an X by each of their three choices, rather than to put 1, 2 or 3 by their names. The advice given by information officers on the day may have been wrong. Could that be considered as an important part of the review?

Douglas Alexander: To rehearse a point that I have already made, it is not for me to prescribe the work of the review, but clearly if such activity was taking place at polling stations, it is wholly unacceptable. As I understand it, such a matter would be the direct responsibility of the electoral returning officers, but that is one of the issues that it seems entirely appropriate for the independent review to investigate. There was, as the hon. Gentleman acknowledges, a recognition of the need to ensure that people were available to explain the systems of voting that were in place, but it seems entirely appropriate that the review should consider the matter that he raises.

Ian Davidson: The Secretary of State mentioned the number of ballot papers that were spoiled. Can he tell us how many of them were spoiled as a result of over-voting or something similar, and how many were spoiled by being left blank? As I said to the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell), it is entirely possible that many of those ballot papers were deliberate abstentions, and should therefore not be counted as spoiled papers, as it was the voter's intention to spoil them.

Douglas Alexander: One of the striking features of the authoritative figures that I have just shared with the House is that the regional vote, which for the first time appeared on the left-hand side of the joint ballot paperthat, of course, is a matter of contentionhad significantly fewer rejected votes than the constituency section of the ballot paper, which was on the right-hand side of the paper. In that sense, it is entirely relevant for the independent review, if it is so minded, to consider that issue. It is at least possible that, in a certain number of cases, people were determined to vote for a particular party on the regional list section of the ballot paper, and were determined not to vote for any candidate on the constituency section. I do not for a minute suggest that that explains the scale of the number of rejected papers, but it has been suggested, at least anecdotally, that there may have been individuals who, for example, were determined to vote for the Green party on the regional list, but who decided not to vote in the constituency section. That is a matter that will need to be considered by the independent review.

Oliver Heald: I do not quite get the right hon. Gentleman's maths; 140,000 votes were lost, but he is saying that the figure is somehow less than 140,000 because the votes were in two different categories. How many people is he saying were disfranchised?

Douglas Alexander: I am not sure that the hon. Gentleman has a grasp of geography or of electoral systems. He alleged, before the House, that 140,000 people had had their votes denied. Given that there was a vote both in the regional section and in the constituency section, it is perfectly conceivable that the same people are accounted for in both figures. I am not able to give a figure for the number of people involved, but I can rehearse the authoritative figures, whereas the hon. Gentleman, with absolutely no factual evidence [Interruption.] He has now accepted that he may well be wrong; well, that is significant progress.

Jim Devine: That argument would perhaps explain a small loss of votes, but let me tell the Secretary of State about the position in my local area. In Lothian, there was a list system on the left-hand side of the paper and the constituency section was on the right; they basically ran on from each other. We lost hundreds of votes because people voted for the Scottish Labour party under the list system and did not transfer over to the other side of the paper. The design of the paper is a crucial part of the inquiry.

Douglas Alexander: I will come to the issue of the design of the paper and the responsibility for the variations in design across the country. That issue was rehearsed by the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, who spoke for the Opposition, and was referred to at least implicitly in the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Livingston (Mr. Devine).

Pete Wishart: Will the Secretary of State give way?

Douglas Alexander: I have been generous in giving way and now I will make a little more progress. A key concern of the Arbuthnott commission was the need to enhance the understanding of the regional vote, which we have just been discussing. The process that led from the Arbuthnott commission first drawing attention to the combined ballot paper model used in the New Zealand elections to the final design was inclusive and consensual. Consultation was extensive and detailed. As I have already told the House, there were 29 responses to that consultation, and three late responses were also taken into account. Political parties, voters, election administrators, representatives of disabled peoples' organisations and all other interested parties were consulted.
	Under the terms of the Scotland Act 1998, I am responsible for laying before Parliament the orders that set the statutory requirements for ballot papers for elections to the Scottish Parliament. Those requirements are set out in the Scottish Parliamentary Elections (Returning Officers' Charges) Order 2007, which was approved by both Houses, without Division, in March this year. As in other elections, including general elections, returning officers have statutory responsibility for implementing the rules covered in the elections order, and have scope to alter the design of the ballot papers provided that they do not diverge from those statutory requirements. Those are all matters that will be covered in Mr. Gould's report, so the Government amendment asks the House to allow him to do the job for which he is well qualified. When he has finished his task, we will be able to take stock and form a view about what further action is necessary. A statutory review led by an independent expert is already under way. The Government have made it clear that they will co-operate with the review and will consider whether further action is necessary. It is expected that the review will be concluded in just over 12 weeks' time. I ask the House to support the Government's amendment.

Jo Swinson: I start by joining in the congratulations to the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) on his recent election to the post of First Minister. I just wish that he were here so that I could offer those congratulations to him in person. We will have to hope that he is an avid reader of  Hansard and still has the time to keep up with what is happening in the House.
	We were all appalled as we watched events unfold on the night of 3 May and in the early hours of the following morning. The mess of the rejected ballot papers, the electronic counting problems and the delayed counts were certainly, as the motion says, an affront to democracy. Since the election, there has been time for reflection on those events, and we have gained a certain amount of knowledge in that time. We now know just how many people lost their vote on 3 May. We know that an Electoral Commission inquiry led by Ron Gould will look into the conduct of the elections, and we know that the Secretary of State is still not taking full responsibility for the fiasco. However, there is still much to discuss, and that is why I welcome the debate.

Anne Moffat: On the hon. Lady's point about welcoming the debate, I note that she has said:
	I welcome the review that the right hon. Gentleman has said will look at the contentious aspects of the spoiled ballots, the postal voting and the electronic counting...we should wait for the review to understand properly where the problems lay.[ Official Report, 8 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 27.]
	Is that not jumping on the Tory bandwagon? May I tell the hon. Lady that she should be very afraid of opening Pandora's box when it comes to the Scottish parliamentary elections, because we made the amendment to introduce first past the post.

Jo Swinson: I welcome the hon. Lady's intervention, and her warning, which I am sure was kindly meant. We certainly welcome the review, as we stated in the Liberal Democrat amendment, which was tabled but not selected. Obviously, many Members of the House have views on the Scottish elections and, as has already been said, I am sure that Ron Gould will be taking special notice of this debate and the experiences that hon. Members will want to share. The opportunity to share those experiences was perhaps more limited when the Secretary of State for Scotland made his statement on 8 May. This is an important time to bring up the issues that hon. Members of all parties have mentioned; I believe that that will be helpful to the inquiry.
	Obviously, the purpose of the inquiry is to ensure that mistakes are not repeated. Some mistakes can be forgiven, but failing to learn from them cannot be forgiven. We need to look in detail at the circumstances surrounding the selecting of the ballot paper design. We need to ask why problems occurred, not only with the e-counting. but with the postal vote; clearly, that should have been one of the least troublesome aspects of the election. It was the one part that we were already used to, as it had been used in previous elections. We need to ask whether, as the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) suggested, decoupling the Scottish and local elections would succeed in reducing voter confusion while maintaining turnout levels.
	On the issue of spoiled ballot papers, as has been said, there were 15 constituencies in which the winning Scottish National party's majority was smaller than the number of rejected ballots. As has been pointed out, the highest difference was in Edinburgh East and Musselburgh. Interestingly enough, the second highest difference was in Glasgow Govan, where the number of spoiled ballot papers was greater than the majority by 1,106. Like others, I do not want to call the election result into question, but it is worrying that the figures provide a sound basis for those who want to do so. Whatever people's views on that, it is certainly true that the high levels of spoiled papers undermine the public's faith in the electoral system. We need to put that right.
	The single ballot paper commanded general support among political parties and other organisations that were consulted in the run-up to designing it. In Committee, a draft ballot paper was circulated and we discussed how clear it would be for voters. However, two issues need to be raised: first, how it was tested; and secondly, the difference between it and the ballot papers in Glasgow and Edinburgh. As has been mentioned, the testing was carried out by a company called Cragg Ross Dawson. That involved 100 people being interviewed and asked their views on five different ballot paper designs. Interestingly, the single ballot paper was the most popular, as the Minister said in Committee.
	Looking in more detail at what happened in the testing process, 7 per cent. of the test subjects mistakenly spoiled their ballot paper. The Secretary of State gave the figures for spoilage in the different elections. If one combines them, it could be 140,000 individuals, although I accept that it is impossible for us to find out exactly how many individuals spoiled their ballots without compromising voter privacy.

Ian Davidson: Does the hon. Lady accept that although it is impossible for any of us to know at this stage, it is not impossible for Ron Gould to discover it by examining the individual papers? Indeed, it is possible to remove identifying remarks from ballot papers and to make them widely available so that anoraks can study them.

Jo Swinson: The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. Electoral anoraks, as it were, having a look at the ballot papers and where the confusion lay, obviously with identifiers removed, will be an important part of the process. That would clearly take some time, but, dare I say, with the technology of the different barcodes it may even be possible to find out how many individuals were affected, although given our experience of the technology so far that may be easier said than done.
	Taking the figure of 140,000 to be the total number who spoiled their ballots, that could be as many as 7 per cent. of the population, which is the proportion that were spoiled in the testing stages. Given that this was the ballot paper design that produced mistakes, should not the Electoral Commission have been a little more robust in its testing? A sample size of 100 is not very large in statistical terms; it equates to just seven individuals, which may not be statistically significant.

Eric Joyce: I wonder whether the hon. Lady will comment on something that she said in Committee on 7 March:
	I welcome the new design. The dual colour scheme will make it clear that the separate votes are to go on one paper. I also welcome having a single paper for the Scottish Parliament and a separate paper for local government because it will help remove confusion among voters. [Official Report, Fourth Delegated Legislation Committee, 7 March 2007; c. 9.]

Jo Swinson: I accept that. As I said a moment ago, there was acceptance on both sides of the Committee that a single ballot paper was the best way to proceed. We all believed that and are dismayed by what has happened. That is why it is important to have the inquiry to find out what could have been done differently. I urge Ron Gould, in the conduct of his inquiry, to investigate thoroughly why, after that level of testing, the Electoral Commission did not then probe further, conduct further tests and see how the spoilage rate could have been reduced. That may well be instructive for what to do in future.
	How hands-on were the Secretary of State and the Minister with the testing process? In terms of making the decision, I can understand their saying that it was the most popular option, but it would have been fairer to say that it is likely to have a higher spoilage rate. Will they publish any correspondence and communication that they had with the Electoral Commission so that it can be in the public domain and everyone in this House and among the public is able to see what went on?
	The spoilage rates in Glasgow and Edinburgh are of particular concern, because of the top 10 constituencies with high spoilage rates, seven were in Glasgow and Edinburgh. About 1,000 more papers were spoiled there than in the next nearest region. As a voter in East Dunbartonshire, I did not realise until after the election that a different ballot paper had been issued for Glasgow and Edinburgh. I understand that that was because there was a problem with fitting all the names on to the ballot paper that had been drafted. I have seen an example of the one used in Glasgow, which seems to have 23 different parties contesting the regional list side of it. The ballot paper does not have the clear arrow design that was shown to us in Committee. It has information at the top of it, but not the very obvious arrows pointing to the columns where the individual would need to vote. I can understand why it was more confusing. Indeed, the spoilage rates were on average 2 per cent. higher in Glasgow and Edinburgh than in the rest of Scotland, so there is good evidence that it led to confusion. The Secretary of State said that this is just a matter for returning officers and that he had nothing to do with it. However, when we were shown in Committee the draft ballot paper design with arrows on it, we were all led to believe that that was how it would be designed. That was at the beginning of March. When was the decision made to change it? Did the Secretary of State know about the change? Did he approve of it? Could not the need for it have been foreseen? There would have been room on the ballot paper to include the arrows, so why was that not done?

Jim Sheridan: Does the hon. Lady agree that the fundamental problem with the election was the voting system, namely PR? Does she agree that there is no credibility whatsoever in any PR system given what has happened in Scotland? Her party's core objective is to try to get minority parties represented, yet most of the minority parties in the Scottish elections did not get a seat.

Jo Swinson: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but I must correct him. My party's objective is not to get minority parties represented, but to get the election result to reflect the way that people voted so that everyone's vote counts. That is hugely important to the credibility of the voting system. I do not accept that the PR voting system was the problem. Indeed, we had the same system for the Scottish Parliament elections in 2003, and it was not a problem. The single transferable vote system that was implemented this year had a much lower spoilage rate than the Scottish Parliament system. That points to its success and clarity. It was easy for people to understand how to rank in order of preference, as opposed to the confusion caused by the spoiled ballot papers.

Sammy Wilson: Does the hon. Lady agree that there is a certain degree of hypocrisy and irony in what has been said given that the Labour party imposed PR elections on people in Northern Ireland for the simple reason that they said it would lead to a fairer result?

Jo Swinson: The hon. Gentleman makes his point very well [ Interruption. ]

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Lady should be heard.

Jo Swinson: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
	Let me turn to postal voting. Members on both sides of the House have encouraged postal voting as a way of ensuring that people find it easy to vote, and that is welcome. People want a postal vote for a whole variety of reasons. They include people who are working away from homein Scotland, that can be offshorepeople who are on holiday, people who are housebound, and people who have busy lives and it is one less thing to do. That is a trend that has been happening over several elections, and is not difficult to predict. We know that postal voting has been increasing. Surely, we ought to be able to get it right. That aspect of the election was not newit had happened previouslyeven though more people applied for postal votes in the recent elections.

John Barrett: Does my hon. Friend agree that the elections presented a perfect opportunity to consider the early opening of postal votes and establish that a problem was about to happen on 3 May? Many votes had been opened in advance and returning officers must have known at least a week before the election that the percentage of spoiled ballot papers would be high.

Jo Swinson: My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, which I hope Ron Gould will examine in the context of flagging up difficulties and perhaps issuing advice at polling stations to try to counteract the problems of spoilt ballots.

Andrew Robathan: The hon. Lady has welcomed postal voting in the busy lives of the electorate. How much has the turnout increased since it was made more widely available?

Jo Swinson: I do not have the figures to hand. I did not realise that they would be an issue in the debate. However, many of my constituents welcome the opportunity to vote by post [Interruption.]

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. Too many conversations are breaking out across the Chamber. The hon. Lady has the floor.

Jo Swinson: My constituents tell me that they appreciate the opportunity of voting by post and the simplicity of doing that. That is welcome, but many were incredibly worriedthey wrote to me and e-mailed mebecause they were about to go on holiday and had been told that they would get a postal vote before they went but it had not arrived. People understandably feel strongly about being disfranchised. They have every right to be angry. As the Secretary of State knows, the issue was raised before the elections. I went on Newsnight and one of the points I made was that it was ominous that postal voting was the bit that should have been easy to get right, and it did not bode well for the electronic counting and so on.
	We need to consider why lessons were not learned. Many of the same problems arose in the Greater London assembly elections in 2004: 423,000 Londoners registered to vote by post but 159,000 did not vote. Thousands of postal ballot papers were not even delivered. The Royal Mail apparently told the returning officer in Lewisham that it could guarantee delivery of only four out of every five ballot papers. A report was conducted about the GLA elections and we should have learned lessons from it. The Secretary of State has some explaining to do about the failure to take advantage of the experiences of 2004 to prevent further problems in Scotland.
	Let us consider election decoupling, which the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale emphasised. I take issue with the Conservative motion's contention that the Government ignored advice about holding elections on the same day. I believe that they listened to the advice but took the view that holding the elections on the same day would increase turnout. I have much sympathy with that view.

Pete Wishart: The decision to hold elections on the same day was a matter for the Scottish Executive, of which the Liberals were part. The hon. Lady and I attended the debate about the Arbuthnott commission. One of John Arbuthnott's clear recommendations was not to hold the elections on the same day, but it was ignored.

Jo Swinson: I accept that John Arbuthnott made that recommendation. However, I believe that there remains a good case for holding elections on the same day. If we consider turnout figures, about which we all care deeply, the turnout in the three local government elections in Scotland in 1992, 1994 and 1995 varied between 42 per cent. and 45 per cent. In the three years when local elections were held on the same day as the Scottish Parliament elections1999, 2003 and this yearthe turnout was between 49 per cent. and 59 per cent. That is at least 5 per cent. higher.
	Let me put the 140,000 spoiled ballots into context. Five per cent. more people going to vote in Scotland is the equivalent of 193,000 more votes being cast. That is important because it denotes another way in which people's voices are lost in the electoral system. There is, therefore, an argument for holding the elections on the same day.
	Not that much evidence yet suggests that holding the elections on the same day caused the problem. The spoilage rate for the STV element of the election was low compared with that for the Scottish Parliament election. That suggests that the problem lies with the ballot papers for the Scottish Parliament elections. The logic of the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale is therefore somewhat flawed.
	Last week, I presented a Bill on STV for the Scottish Parliament elections. I believe that it would help solve the problem of decoupling because we could then hold elections on the same day but under the same electoral system, which would allow people's voices to be heard and reflected in the election results. I hope that the Government will reconsider that issue.

Simon Hughes: Does my hon. Friend agree that although there may be a case for ensuring that local and national elections are on a different day so that people can vote locally on local issues, the elections that we are considering definitely make a case for all elections in the UK to be on a 1-2-3 basis so that people have the same system, whatever the forum for which they are voting?

Jo Swinson: Yes, perhaps unsurprisingly I agree with my hon. Friend that a preferential voting system1-2-3is easy for people to do and means that their vote counts. [Hon Members: What about 4?] Let me make some progress [Interruption.]

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. Once again, I remind hon. Members of the rules of debating. If they wish to make a comment, perhaps they can seek to catch the hon. Lady's eye to make an intervention.

Jo Swinson: I hope that the Government will think again about introducing STV for the Scottish Parliament elections.
	The Conservative motion also deals with the Secretary of State's failure to accept responsibility for the elections. He has been remiss in that. We want to hear the outcome of the inquiry, but we also need to hear an apology from the Secretary of State, who is responsible for the elections. People in Scotland are understandably annoyed about what has happened and about their votes not being counted.
	Let us consider the e-counting. One of the problems was the involvement of private companies in the counting service. DRS has been involved in various election problems, not only in the Scottish elections. It apparently tested the machinery, which, according to the Secretary of State, did not predict any of the major problems. However, I understand from the Edinburgh  Evening News that e-counting was introduced for the Scottish Parliament and local council elections at a cost of 8.8 million. I presume that most of the money went to the company. I do not know whether the full details of the contracts are under confidentiality agreements, but it would be useful to know exactly how much the company was paid for running the elections.
	Some penalty clauses in the contract may be invoked so that the company might have to pay back thousands of pounds where problems occurred with the counts. However, a few thousand pounds out of a contract of 8.8 million constitutes getting off lightly given the chaos that ensued. I would welcome more details about the contracts and exactly how harsh the penalty clauses were. Clearly, the motivation for the companies to ensure that they got it right on the night was inadequate. Some of us who were sitting in television studios in the early hours of the morning saw that they blatantly did not get it right.
	I welcome the appointment of Ron Gould to head the inquiry. He is clearly one of the world's foremost experts on the matter and has great experience in elections internationally. I was intrigued by the Opposition motion's words on that. Sadly, the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale would not take an intervention on the subject. As my hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) said, if the Electoral Commission cannot appoint someone independently, who does the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale suppose should do the appointing? If the inquiry will not be independent if the Scotland Office or the Electoral Commission nominate somebody, does he want the Conservative party to stipulate who will be independent? I suspect that it will not be easy to hold an independent inquiry under his definition if an independent, international election expert does not fit the bill in his view. His argument is flawed.
	The hon. Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) made a point about the public's input into the inquiry. I agree that it is essential to get the views of real voters who found problems with the ballot system. Frankly, we may not get that if we simply rely on people coming forward to the inquiry. Ron Gould needs to be proactive about seeking out people's experiences.
	To conclude, the elections were a fiasco from start to finish. Many thousands of voters were disfranchised by the postal vote delay and the spoiled ballots, which ran to 140,000.

Rosemary McKenna: Will the hon. Lady give way?

Jo Swinson: No.
	Counts were abandoned on the night as the technology crashed, and Scottish politics was made a laughing stock. I was left wondering exactly what the Scotland Office is for. The running of elections is almost the only thing for which it is directly responsible, and it cannot even get that right. The Secretary of State should be ashamed. He should apologise to the Scottish people and ensure that such electoral chaos is never repeated.

Eric Joyce: The hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) started by congratulating the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) on his new appointment. It would perhaps be churlish of me not to do the same, but it occurs to me that there is sometimes a place for a bit of churlishness in politics. Let me embody that for a moment.
	The hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) referred to the fact that we are not likely to see a great deal of the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan down here. He is a busy manhe is running Scotland for the moment, for however long that might beand we will observe carefully how often he represents his constituents in this Chamber.

Ben Wallace: The hon. Gentleman seems to have forgotten that the late Donald Dewar, and Jim Wallace, remained Members of the House as well as Members of the Scottish Parliament for the next few years until the election. They seemed to have no trouble with the idea of doing both jobs.

Eric Joyce: I grant the hon. Gentleman that, but at that interim stage the Scottish Parliament was brand new. Twelve, 18 or 20 by-elections would have been necessary in Scotland, and no party supported that idea. We now have a new First Minister who, as all Members of the House understand, will rarely be able to come down here and represent his constituents.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. Will all hon. Members now concentrate their remarks on the motion and the amendment before the House?

Eric Joyce: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
	Last year, I twice had the pleasure of going to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to observe two phases of the presidential elections. The Congo is the size of western Europe and has a population of about 60 million. The Kinshasa ballot paper, which was about 20 or 30 ft long, listed about 700 candidates. Most of the people voting were illiterate, but, somehow, a 65 per cent. turnout was achieved. Apart from a little bit of shooting here and a little overindulgence therethe guns and the alcohol asidethe result was universally agreed by the international community. Therefore, on the morning of 4 May there was some disappointment in Falkirk and, I suspect, other places across Scotland. That was the second most disappointing bitthe most disappointing bit was just losing.
	The hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale is trying desperately hard and failing to make the issue a party political one, but the reality is that there was consensus, to a substantial degree, before the event. All the parties were consulted. He equivocated slightly earlieras we shall see when we look at  Hansardbut he was unequivocal when he said:
	I accept that the Scottish Conservatives acceded to a single Scottish Parliament ballot paper[ Official Report, 8 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 26.]

Pete Wishart: Is the hon. Gentleman saying that the Democratic Republic of the Congo ran a more efficient election than the Scotland Office? If so, what can the Secretary of State learn from the DRC?  [Interruption.]

Eric Joyce: As my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Stephen Pound) says from a sedentary position, there were probably one or two fewer killed in Scotland. I am simply saying that we were all disappointed by the shortcomings in the process. There was substantial consensus in advance, and apparently even the Scottish Tories acceded. My understanding is that the Scottish Tories did not reply formally to any of the consultations. The hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale accepts, however, that they acceded.

David Mundell: I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman was present for the statement, but we have never suggested otherwise than that we accepted the single ballot paper. We did not accept, however, that that ballot paper should be used on the same day as another ballot paper, on which people were encouraged to place more than one mark.

Eric Joyce: The motion clearly criticises the Government in relation to holding
	local government elections under the newly introduced single transferable vote system.
	The hon. Gentleman had said, however, that he acceded to that system, so it seems to me that that should not be in the motion.

David Mundell: If the hon. Gentleman had listened to my earlier remarks and to remarks that I have made on numerous occasions in the House, he would know that I did not accept that the Scottish Parliament elections should have been held on the same day as the local government elections, when different systems of voting were being used. Nor do I accept that the Secretary of State for Scotland did not have a role to play in discussing with the Scottish Executive, with which he had some sway at that point, the need to ensure that those elections were not held on the same day, with the inevitable, entirely predictable confusion.

Eric Joyce: I am not sure whether that is the hon. Gentleman's personal view or the party view. In the past, to his great credit, he has been quick to criticise the Scottish Tories. Perhaps his comments are an implied criticism of the Scottish Torieshe does not always put such criticisms out to the pressbut he is equivocating now, as his motion criticises the Government for something to which he agrees the Scottish Tories acceded.
	The inquiry under way is a statutory inquiry, which is required by Government and legislation. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has said, however, the hon. Gentleman seems to want a concurrent inquiry. It would be common sense, however, for a statutory inquiry to take place, finish and give a result, and then to decide whether to have another one. An independent inquiry could be held. We shall see what the result of the initial inquiry is. A number of actions will take place and Members will have views on what those should be. However, it seems to make sense to all of usexcept perhaps the Toriesthat that should happen after the initial inquiry. It is as simple as that.
	The most disappointing aspect of the evening of the elections, however, was not the party political stuff, but the performance of DRS. The evening took on the nature of a sort of mass social science experiment in sleep deprivation. At one moment, at the count in Falkirk, the returning officer said that she was about to announce the results, but then could not do soshe was told that by the DRS staff. It took another hour and a half to get the results. It was clear at that point that something was going badly wrong in the DRS processes. I saw on television a chirpy DRS spokesperson saying that everything was going marvellously. There was not a moment of doubt in DRS's mind, even after the event when it was manifestly clear to everyone in the Chamber, everyone on the ground, and everyone in the hall that it was making a complete hash of it.

Ian Davidson: rose

Jim Devine: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Eric Joyce: Of course.

Jim Devine: We had the first indications of a problem at 2 o'clock in the morning, and we received a promise of an expert from DRS every 20 minutes after that. The count had to be suspended at 5.30 am because no one had arrived and no one could explain the problems.

Eric Joyce: I shared some of my hon. Friend's experience. I was disappointed by the fact that DRS could not organise things properly on the night. I was doubly disappointed, however, by its total lack of acceptance and its arrogant response. I was not sure how senior the person put up by DRS wasshe might have been a very senior person. It seemed to me, however, that DRS had shoved someone out to take the rap on the evening.

Ian Davidson: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. Apparently I could not be seen when I rose earlierthere was a cloud blocking out the sun. Does my hon. Friend believe, as I do, that the National Audit Office should investigate the contract with DRS to see whether it was suitably arrived at and suitably achieved?

Eric Joyce: That is an interesting suggestion. I do not know what costs were involveda point already raised by the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshirebut DRS's efficiency is certainly an issue. One of the DRS reps in Falkirk said to me, It's not our fault. We've just got trouble with the IT. The mind boggles. We often hear that phrase used in public, but on the evening when DRS's IT was critical, it was a preposterous statement.

Gordon Banks: At the count in Ochil in the early hours of 4 May, when the result was expected and generally known, although the majority was very small we waited for up to an hour for some light to change from red to green before the announcement could be officially made. Nothing seemed to happen in that process, other than somewhere, something in some machine was to turn a light from red to green. That would not change the results, but it was necessary before they could be given.

Eric Joyce: I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. The whole DRS experience was disappointing. I hope that there is a detailed inquiry to come.

Rosemary McKenna: Does my hon. Friend agree that there was great disappointment for those of us waiting in Strathkelvin and Bearsdena huge Labour gain? Sue Bruce, the chief executive, made the right decision. She was the first person to suspend the count until the following day. Thus, there was no sleep deprivation in Strathkelvin and Bearsden, just great celebration.

Eric Joyce: My hon. Friend makes a good point. I cannot remember how huge that victory was, but it was unbelievably massive. When I think of sleep deprivation experience in retrospect as a social experiment, it would probably be best if there were no guns or alcohol the previous evening. With all those people, not necessarily the best of buddies, in the same room, that might have added a bit of juice to the occasion.
	In Falkirk, Westthe part of my constituency with which I am most concerned, because we lost itthere are some details that worry me greatly. One is that the margin of the Scottish national party victoryabout 750 voteswas substantially smaller than the number of votes that were apparently spoiled, about 1,200. I do not call the result into question, but the difference is substantial. For me, the key figure is the difference between the number of votes spoiled last timeabout 100and this time. There is clearly a fundamental problem. I suspect that there is something in the idea that some people deliberately spoiled their votes, as we have heard. A few people may have voted for a minor party in the list and chose not to put a second mark. My experience of standing and looking at the screen suggested that many people had voted Labour but put nothing down the middle. That was probably the case for other parties as well. It seemed to be the general pattern.
	From speaking to constituents after the fact, although this is not a scientific sample, I suspect that a good number of the people who did not follow on and put a second cross in the constituency section were older than the average among the voters. In particular parts of my constituency there are high flats occupied primarily by old age pensioners. If there is a pattern, it seems to me that it was those people in particular who had difficulty with the ballot paper.
	In conclusion, it is for the inquiry to decide what to examine. As it goes about its business, it is enormously important that it addresses the issues raised by other hon. Members today. When I think about the way that the evening was conducted, my primary concern was the efficiency, or lack of it, of DRS, which sadly underperformed on the evening.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I advise hon. Members that there is very little time left for this debate. Would Members therefore please be concise in their remarks and address them to the motion or the amendment before the House?

Charles Walker: I shall be brief because, as an Englishman, I feel that I am intruding on private grief, but as a member of the Scottish Affairs Committee, I feel that I am entitled to express a view.
	Growing up in Britain, I was always proud that our democratic system was a benchmark of success that nations across the world wanted to replicate. Election monitors from this country used to travel to the third world and emerging democracies to make sure that their elections were above board and honest. I imagine that Ron Gould, who I believe is an excellent chap, was expecting to spend more time in Zimbabwe in the coming months than in Scotland, so when he got the phone call he must have been a little surprised, but willing to take on the challenge none the less.

Angus MacNeil: On a point of information, may I point out to the hon. Gentleman that Westminster is not running Zimbabwe's elections, although it did run Scotland's elections.

Charles Walker: About six years ago, many in this place mocked the electoral system in the United States of America, especially the hanging chads, on which history was changed. One moment there was a Democrat President, and the next moment there was a Republican President, who is still in office, though fortunately only for another couple of years. We in the Chamber thought that it could never happen in the United Kingdom, yet in Scotland history may well have been changed by the appalling electoral system that was foisted on the people of Scotland.
	It is possible, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) pointed out, that we might have had a Labour First Minister if the votes cast had been properly counted or had counted. But no, they were not counted, and we have a new first Minister from the Scottish National party. If Scotland becomes an independent nation in a few years, as the SNP wants, historians in 100 years time may say that what changed Scotland was a failed electoral system devised by the nations that gave the world democracy. It seems bizarre, but it could happen.
	What is so depressing about what happened in Scotland is that it further disfranchises a cynical electorate. We in the House are desperate to push up turnoversorry, turnout. We have cajoled and persuaded people that it is their democratic duty to voteso when people vote, perhaps for the first time, it is not unreasonable for them to expect their vote to count. Unfortunately, in this case it did not.

Gordon Banks: Should there not be a simple and easy method of voting? That is the point that I think the hon. Gentleman is trying to make.

Charles Walker: I agree. I have served with the hon. Gentleman on the Scottish Affairs Committee and he always makes useful contributions.
	It is not unreasonable to expect people to walk a few hundred yards to a polling station once a year or once every other year. Democracy needs to be treasured and valued. In the pursuit of increasing turnout, we can sometimes devalue the system of democracy. I therefore have concerns about postal voting and its wide availability. England has had problems in Birmingham, with ghost voters appearing on electoral rolls. We must be very careful that we restore confidence in the democratic and electoral system, not only in Scotland but in England.

Katy Clark: Does the hon. Gentleman share my belief that one of the most valuable aspects of the traditional way of counting votes in Britain is the emphasis on transparency and checks and balances? Does he agree that the refusal to recount in two of the constituencies in Scotland is perhaps one of the most worrying aspects of that election? For all involved in the political process and for all political parties, we must ensure that we enshrine those checks and balances and transparency in the future.

Charles Walker: The hon. Lady makes a hugely important point.
	Speaking as someone who has a great love of the country, let me say that Scotland did not need what happened earlier this month. It neither needed it nor deserved it. What happened was an embarrassment, of which we should all be ashamed.
	I conclude by agreeing that elections are very special things that need to be treasured. I remember my first election and I am sure that every hon. Member remembers theirs and the excitement of seeing the ballot papers counted and of watching the scrutineers do their work. Participating in the democratic process is hugely important, but, as I say, it was hugely damaged three weeks ago. We must not allow it to happen again.

Ann McKechin: I welcome Mr. Gould's appointment. I do not rule out the need for further inquiries, but it would be premature to define the exact nature and extent of any such inquiries until we have had at least an initial examination by a person with international experience of voting systems.
	I would argue that the problems experienced over the past few weeks are largely the result of the failurelargely a collective failureto put the views of the voter first. The voters were distinctly secondary in determining the new voting systems in the first place, and they appeared only on the periphery of the many discussions, meetings, debates and commissions that were held over the past two years.
	The hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) raised an important point. Despite the calls to improve voter turnout, the worst figure of all was the turnout of below 52 per cent. If we take away the rejected votes, it was below 50 per cent., despite the fact that this was viewed as the closest-run Holyrood election since the Scottish Parliament was constituted. Let us today kill the myth that changing the voting system improves voter turnout.
	If we analyse the groups that did not vote, the largest sections are young voters and those from the poorest socio-economic backgrounds. Yet for the latter group, rather than encouraging more to vote, we created a system that disfranchised them even more. It is no surprise that the largest number of spoilt papers were in the areas of the highest socio-economic deprivationmore than 2,000 in both Glasgow, Pollok and Glasgow, Shettleston.
	Mr Gould's review needs to ensure that the voices of all voters, and particularly the marginalised voterswhether it be the young, the poor, our ethnic minorities or the disabledare properly heard. It should also ensure that, in future, the methodology used by the Electoral Commission in testing original proposals is properly robust and takes all relevant factors into consideration.

Jim Devine: Does my hon. Friend agree that the returning officers have an important role? What was striking during the last election was the number of people, many from poorer areas, who were not on the register.

Ann McKechin: I certainly agree with my hon. Friend that electoral registration officers have a very poor record indeed in respect of their ability to deal with marginalised groups, and this month's events have unfortunately made the situation even worse.
	From my own experience of representing a Glasgow seat, I know that problems with adult literacy among many in our population remain acute. Scotland has some of the lowest levels of literacy not only in the UK, but in the whole of western Europe. When someone's literacy is poor, form filling is a daunting experience and many people lack the confidence even to admit that they have a problem in the first place. If people receive two pieces of paper with two contrasting sets of instructions, by the time they put pencil to paper, we can expect a small but significant percentage to be confused.
	Do I think that the elections should have been held on separate dates? Not necessarily. Some polling clerks used their initiative on the day to hand the papers out separately, giving out the second ballot after the voter had completed the first vote. It would probably have been better for the ballots to take place in different rooms in the polling station, so that only one set of instructions was given for each vote. The disappearing guiding arrows in Glasgow and Lothian only made a bad problem even worse. If forms are something that people tackle only occasionally and then often with help from a third party or friend, it should have been anticipated that some looking at the form would have read it as one long list that simply continued on to the right hand side of the page. The regional list was not even in strict alphabetical order. Branded names came first, based on the first letter on the line. Political parties, however bizarre or tiny, came next, and independents came last. The latter positioning reinforced the sight line that the four or five names at the top of the right-hand column were simply a continuation of the independents' names on the left side. I was not alone in witnessing the hundreds of papers that showed one cross on the left-hand side and no votes on the constituency side. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, South-West (Mr. Davidson) that that was deliberate in some cases, but I do not believe that an overwhelming majority intended to abstain. By that point, they must simply have been baffled.
	Branded names have to be analysed. I certainly accept that the Scottish National party is a perfectly legitimate party and that it used the rules as it was entitled to under the law. However, I certainly have a question about the British National party describing itself as a local party for local people. We need to be very careful, because the system could easily be abused. It is no credit to Scotland that more than 24,000 people voted for the BNP in those elections.
	The font size on the form, made to fit the machine, was ridiculously small. That was repeated on the constituency side, even though there was plenty of unused space for an enlarged font size. Instructions such as the guiding arrows should not be removed simply for the convenience of the machinery or at the sole discretion of electoral registration officers. They are fundamental to allowing people to vote as they intend, and that should be a democratic right.
	The bewildering choice of regional list candidates, a significant number of whom were making a once-only appearance, needs to be reviewed. It was clear, particularly for individual candidates, that many were also standing for council seats but were canny enough to work out that getting on to the regional list secured them a Royal Mail freepost delivery, meaning that they did not have to trek around delivering everything by hand.

John Barrett: Does the hon. Lady acknowledge the danger of commercial companies, such as those on the Lothian list, using their presence on the ballot paper to get a free mail shot through every door in Lothian, which could be used to advertise their business?

Ann McKechin: I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman on that point. I am aware that at least two of the so-called political parties were simply the creations of one individual, and that one was used to promote an individual's own publication. Standing for elections to the Scottish Parliament involves considerable public expenditure on freepost, and it should be based on serious intent. I believe that candidates should show an appropriate number of supporting nominations. That would not exclude genuine, serious independent candidates.
	The prior publicity about the changes in the voting systems was poor. The detailed instructions arrived along with an avalanche of election literature and probably ended up in many cases going straight into the bin. They came too late and were not sufficiently embedded in the general public's knowledge. Again, I would question the apparent lack of work on voters who are difficult to reach. The instructions on completion for postal voters contained a number of disparities.
	You have only one vote in the council ballot
	is clearly not an accurate way to describe numbering under STV, and there was a total absence of advice for voters about how many councillors per area were being voted for. Why do we keep the voters in ignorance?
	In the council elections where parties fielded more than one candidate per area, there were repeated incidences of forms containing two or three crosses against candidates rather than numbers, and in almost every case, a candidate's chance of being elected was substantially increased if the initial letter of their surname was near the beginning of the alphabet.
	I am astonished that the Electoral Reform Society should have declared the council elections a success. The rejection rate was high, and candidate selection in highly marginal areas being determined by their position in the alphabet cannot be seen to be progressive. There was no increase in the numbers of women or ethnic minority councillors. In fact, we probably ended up with fewer, including the loss in my own constituency of the sole Asian female councillor in Scotland. There was no significant increase in turnout, and despite the fact that, like myself, members of all the main political parties spent a lot of time trying to inform voters about the changes, many people were baffled by their consequences, including losing the long-cherished ability to vote out an unpopular representative.
	This is not the time for shouting the odds at each other and spouting media soundbites. We all have a degree of responsibility for this result. The voters lost out and anyone who is interested in democracy needs closely to examine what went wrong and truly listen to the electorate before we make further changes. They deserve no less.

Angus Robertson: I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin). I hope that any investigation to be conducted by the Electoral Commission or commissioned by the Scottish Executive will look closely at all the points that she has raised. I concur with almost every one of them.
	I am pleased that, among the contributions that we have heard this afternoon, there has been little doubtI cannot say no doubtcast on the result of the elections. Not only did the SNP win, but all the United Kingdom parties lost seats. I thank leading members of all the UK parties for their regular visits to Scotland, which were very beneficial to the SNP's campaign.
	As we speak, the SNP Government and the First Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond), are setting out priorities for the new Administration in the Scottish Parliament. I hope Members in all parts of the House will wish that Government well, but today, here, we are discussing the technical problems associated with the polls rather than the resultalthough I am certain that the SNP majorities and gains could have been more significant than they were, given the national swing.
	There has been mention of elections in other countries. That is one of the reasons why I feel so strongly about the debacle that we experienced in Scotland. In the past, many of us who spend time in countries that are emerging democracies have been able to say with great pride and absolute confidence, regardless of our politics, that we are in no doubt about the result of a particular election. I have sometimes found it hard to listen to politicians or political party activists in other parts of the world explain their difficulties and lack of trust. We all know of countries where the degree of coercion is great. As the problems in Scotland have shown, however, something extraordinarily minor can cause the great problems that we have seen. Certainly I cannot imagine that any politician in Scotland or the rest of the UK would scoff at the electoral problems suffered by Florida a few years ago.

Anne Moffat: Did not proportional representation give Germany Adolf Hitler? To a lesser degree, we have been given the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond). Can that be a good example?

Angus Robertson: The hon. Lady has made her own point in her own way. Perhaps she will reflect on that later.
	Before 3 May, it was apparent that there were serious problems. A number of Members have drawn attention to the problems of constituents who had applied for postal votes. I experienced difficulties myself: my postal vote only arrived on Monday. In my area, council workers were out delivering postal votes by handI do not know whether they were scuttling around in taxisto ensure that they arrived. For those working offshore, they arrived too late and people were disfranchised, which is completely unacceptable.
	It was not, however, only the issue of postal votes that gave cause for alarm in advance. On 7 March 2007, my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr. MacNeil) told the Delegated Committee dealing with Scottish parliamentary elections
	At first glance, the statement on the example ballot paper, 'You have two votes', could be misleading.
	Other Members have made that point as well. Before the elections, similar problems were drawn to the attention of the Arbuthnott commission. The SNP's submission stated:
	Certainly, having entirely different voting systems for elections on the same day leaves the door open to confusion... If both systems were to be used on one day, then a great deal of voter education would be essential.
	Most tellingly, the SNP said:
	There will be new arrangements in... the local government elections. That will mean a vote using STV, and, as previously stated, unless the same system is introduced for the Scottish Parliament election on the same day, or those two elections are decoupled, then there is every chance that confusion will be a factor in those elections.
	That confusion did, of course, come about.
	The SNP also made a submission to the Scottish Electoral Commission. A letter from Peter Murrell, the SNP chief executive, raised three points with Andy O'Neill, head of the commission, two of which were ignored completely. Those were not the only warnings, but I want to put it on the record that warnings were passed to a number of relevant authorities before the elections.
	All of us SNP spokespeople were sitting in the BBC Scotland studio as the surreal events unfolded. I do not know how long colleagues were told they would have to stay in their seats and keep things going until they were replaced by elected MSP colleagues. I was told two hours, but I sat there for five hours before I was finally relieved and left the studioit was just after a number of fantastic SNP gains. However, during that time we learned not only about the problems as they were being reportedthere were literally thousands of spoiled ballot papersbut about something else, which the hon. Member for Falkirk (Mr. Joyce) reminded me of: the extraordinary scene of a DRS spokesperson almost laughing off what was happening when addressing anybody involved in the political process, including the politicians and the pundits involved in the programme. As we witnessed that we thought, My goodness, she has absolutely no idea how serious the situation is.
	Although the SNP regularly makes the point that we do not want to tell the good people of England how they should make their own arrangements, I strongly advise the Greater London authority and Mayor Ken Livingstone to take a careful look at the electoral experience that we in Scotland had. London had its own problems in its first electionsin which I understand DRS was also involvedbut I hope that it does not go through what we in Scotland have just had to go through.
	The motion discusses the inquiry issue. I am pleased that the Scottish Cabinet yesterday discussed that. First Minister Salmond and his colleagues are looking into that; he remains committed to an inquiry taking place, and the details will be announced in due course. However, I and my party colleagues have a problem with what the Opposition motion calls for in terms of an inquiry. I intervened to try to get clarification from the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) on who should initiate an inquiry. It is inconsistent to be against the Electoral Commission being in charge of the inquiry and then to call on the UK Government to conduct it, because we know what their role and that of the Scotland Office in this matter was. That is why the SNP will not support the Opposition motion. We will support the Scottish Executive.

Jim Devine: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Angus Robertson: I am delighted to give way to the hon. Gentleman. As he represents Livingston, I am sure that he will take the opportunity to congratulate the excellent new MSP, Angela Constance.

Jim Devine: I was at a public meeting with Angela and I congratulated her from the platform.
	The hon. Gentleman's leader has spoken about the moral authority of the resultit did not seem to apply in terms of local government, but it seemed to apply in the Scottish Parliament. If the hon. Gentleman's party establishes an inquiry and it shows that the people were disfranchised, will he support having the elections re-run, particularly in places such as Livingston which had 1,700 spoiled papers when most had about 800?

Angus Robertson: Some people might be interested in a re-run. Owing to the popularity of the new Government, I am certain that the SNP majority would increaseeven seats close to the hon. Gentleman's constituency that we just failed to win would fall within our grasp. No serious case is being made for re-running the election, and I do not think that the electoratewhatever their political viewswould encourage that.
	I will conclude shortly, as other Members wish to speak, but I first wish to raise a couple of matters to do with the Secretary of State for Scotland. He was right to warn Members against mis-speaking in terms of what is said in the House. He went on to quote from his own contribution of 8 May 2007. I am keen not to mis-speak it, but it should be put on the record that he read out half a sentence of what he said, stopping at the point where there is a comma. Therefore, it will be useful if I now read out the whole sentence. He read out:
	I urge caution on two fronts. First, a final tally is still to be reached on the number of spoiled papers
	and there he stopped. The rest of that sentence reads
	but according to the information that I received this morning, it does not reach 100,000.[ Official Report, 8 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 29W.]
	As we know, there were more than 100,000 and we should not try to talk down the seriousness of this situation.
	I shall conclude by repeating the questions I asked the Secretary of State on 8 May. I am repeating them because I did not get an answer to them, and I would like to have an answer now. I asked whether the Electoral Commission warned the Secretary of State of concerns about the design of the ballot paper. When the ballot paper size became apparent, did he decide that all must appear on one page? At the end of the ballot design phase, was there any further testing? I then asked him to publish all relevant ministerial correspondence.
	It is important for all those questions to be answered and to be a matter of public record. Frankly, the Secretary of State's contribution was underwhelmingmuch like his initial statementand he seemed to be saying, Not me, guv, rather than anything else. It is not good enough. Thank goodness we now have a Scottish Executive who will treat this issue with the seriousness that it deserves, unlike the UK Government, who are running away from their responsibilities.

Ian Davidson: Given that time is short, I shall make only a few points. First, I ask that the investigation examines the decision to have both ballots on the same day, not only in the context of possible erection irregularities [ Laughter. ] I know what I meant. [Hon. Members: Keep it up.] I will endeavour to do so. That is a fair point [ Interruption. ]

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will now continue his brief remarks.

Ian Davidson: The observation that I wanted to make was about the impact on local government. It was my experience that the local government campaigns were almost totally submerged in the discussion of the Scottish Parliament results. That is not good for local democracy at the local government level. I would be very interested in any evidence about the extent to which there were discrepancies in this election, as distinct from others, because my impression was that the tide flowed in the same direction in the Scottish Parliament elections and those for local authorities, irrespective of the merits of individual councillors, which is inappropriate and unwise.
	I would also ask that as many as possible of the ballot papers be made available. The point that I made earlier about anoraks being able to see them is important. Much work could be done to establish correlations that will help us to avoid mistakes in the future. It should not be swept under the carpet.
	My third point is about the issue of bias on the forms. There was clearly an alphabetical bias and the local government results bear that out. The nationalists are not guilty of breaking the rules, but it was sharp practice to put Alex Salmond at the head of the list. That obviously had an effect. I would like to see that investigated and possible remedies applied in future. We should also examine the extent to which it was made more difficult for people who clearly intended to vote for candidates of a single party to do so because the candidates were not grouped. It would have been sensible to have candidates of the same party grouped together, and that should be investigated. Similarly, my understanding is that if voters who sought to vote for candidates of the same party put three Xs, all the votes were ruled out. It should be possible to devise a system in which the last remaining voteafter the other candidates had been elected or eliminatedcould be given to the candidate.

John Barrett: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if two candidates for the same party had two Xs, they should have both been given a preference at least?

Ian Davidson: I agree. Indeed, with two Xs, if one candidate were eliminated, the X for the remaining candidate should count as a full vote for them. I am sure that that can be done.
	My final point is about the refusal of recounts, which is outrageous, capricious and done at the whim of the returning office in some locations. I have heard it said that many votes for Labour in Glasgow were wasted because they were cast on the second ballot. If only the Co-operative party had stood, many people would not have been disfranchised.

Oliver Heald: It has been a good debate, which has been welcomed on both sides of the House as an opportunity to raise serious concerns. On both sides of the House, there is a recognition that there needs to be a proper inquiry into what went on. Some 146,097 votes were lost. The Secretary of State admits that he does not know how many people that represents, but one thing is for sureit could represent that very number. The Secretary of State, however, is not able to tell us.
	The hon. Member for Falkirk (Mr. Joyce) described the election as having been conducted more badly than the Congo's, and my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) talked about the hanging chads situation in America; those comments show how badly wrong the Scottish election went. Although I fully understand that the Secretary of State wants to wait for his inquiry, the fact is that when 146,000 votes go missing, there should be an apology from those responsible.
	The elections involved two separate voting systems, so they were always going to be difficult. The hon. Member for East Lothian (Anne Moffatt) made that point, as did others; I do not think that she is too keen on the single transferable vote system. Whatever one's perspective, there is no doubt that, as the hon. Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) said, it was never going to be easy for electors to deal with two different kinds of electoral process on the same day. Whatever one says about the Electoral Commission, it was given a difficult task in the run-up to the elections.
	The Government and the Scottish Executive were warned. The Arbuthnott commission made the clear recommendation that the elections should be decoupled because of the complexity, confusion and risk of invalid votes. It took the Government months to respond to that report. When we consider the warnings given by my hon. Friend the Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) in a Westminster Hall debate and in his Bill as an MSP in Edinburgh, we see that the problems did not happen by accident. When he was an MSP, my hon. Friend put forward a Bill in the Scottish Parliament that called for decoupling, and the Conservatives have been saying the same thing throughout [Interruption.] I am talking about the Scottish Parliament, which this Government set upthat very place. I am sure that the Secretary of State has come across it at some time in Scotland.

Alistair Carmichael: I am not sure that the hon. Gentleman has, though.

Oliver Heald: I have [Laughter.] It is very interesting. The Liberal Democrats, the other guilty party that went along with it all, may be laughing now, but the people of Scotland will not be laughing about the fact that their electoral system was dealt with in such a way.
	I turn now to other issues. The election does not seem to have been conducted well as far as postal votes are concerned; people got them very late or not at all. The Government have form on the issue: in Birmingham, postal votes were the cause of the Mawrey inquiry, which alleged that there was less protection in Britain than in a banana republic. The hon. Member for Falkirk raised what happened with DRS. What would his comment be as he looked back at that happy day in June 2006, when DRS claimed that it would provide
	the complete solution to delivering a system that can confidently manage the most complex of elections?
	It does not sound as if it seemed like that on the night.
	Professor John Curtis of Strathclyde university reported that huge numbers cast two votes in one column and none in the other, rendering both votes void. The ballot paper said that people had two votes; that is how the confusion may have been caused. That concern has been expressed in this debate. The Secretary of State comes up with lawyers' arguments to say that the fact that 146,000 votes have been lost is inconsequential and is not a serious matter because what John Curtis says would reduce the number to 80,000.

Douglas Alexander: The hon. Gentleman quoted Professor Curtis of Strathclyde university. Does he accept that the quotation he read out contradicts the assertion he made to the House earlier that 146,000 people were denied their vote? It is either Professor Curtis or the hon. Gentlemanwhich?

Oliver Heald: That is exactly the dancing on a pinhead[Hon. Members: Oh no.] Oh yes. The people of Scotland will read those lawyerly argumentsthe advocate's argumentand realise that the Secretary of State should be apologising to the House, not trying to get round our powerful arguments.
	We want an independent inquiry. Although the Electoral Commission was given a hard task to perform and although it brought in an eminent person, the fact remains that one of the bodiesor stakeholdersaccused of not having performed effectively and properly should not be conducting the inquiry into their own activities. That is absolutely the first base.

Alistair Carmichael: The hon. Gentleman says that the shambles was the result of the actions of the Scottish Executive, the Scotland Office and the Electoral Commission. In those circumstances, who can institute an inquiry?

Oliver Heald: It is not a problem at all [ Interruption. ] The hon. Gentleman makes an absolutely fatuous point. The fact is that the inquiry is being conducted by the Electoral Commission, which is one of the groups that has been criticised. We say that the inquiry should be fully independent, with its own separate organisation. We do such things all the time in this country.

Alistair Carmichael: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Oliver Heald: I have given way far too often for the silliest of points and I do not intend to do so again. [Hon. Members: Go on.] I have only about half a second leftand we all know whose fault that was.
	I am glad that SNP Members say there should be an independent inquiry. If they read our motion they will see that it suggests that the Scottish Executive should co-operate with the Government, so they will realise that we are not saying that the Executive should be ruled out. We think the Executive and the Government should co-operate to set up a genuinely independent inquiry, not one run by one of the parties that has been criticised.

Angus Robertson: Will the hon. Gentleman clarify the point that he wants the UK Government, as opposed to the Scottish Executive,
	to instigate such an inquiry?
	That is the wording in the Conservative motion.

Oliver Heald: I can quote the words to the hon. Gentleman, too. They are on the order paper:
	working in conjunction with the Scottish Executive

Angus Robertson: To instigate.

Oliver Heald: Yes, to instigate. I am suggesting joint working. It would be sad if the first actions of the SNP were to deny such co-operation, because it is extremely important in the UK.

David Cairns: I had written, This has been a serious and thoughtful debateperhaps I should now say it had been serious and thoughtfulas befits a serious and important issue. The Scottish people are looking for answers as to why difficulties were experienced by many voters at the recent elections. They want reassurances that those difficulties will not recur.
	The debate has highlighted the fact that no major issues of principle divide us. We all agree that the events of 3 May need to be examined. We all agree that answers must be forthcoming and we all agree that lessons must be learned for the future. What distinguishes us is not whether those issues should be investigated but rather the manner and sequence of the reviews.
	As many Members pointed out during the debate, the statutory review is already under way. The House established the Electoral Commission and specifically tasked it with the duty that it cannot set aside, and which cannot be set aside other than by fresh legislation, of conducting reviews into elections in the UK. Having given the commission that task, it is sensible to let it carry out the statutory review before deciding what further reviews or steps may be necessary.
	Some have raised the objectionit was repeated again this afternoonthat the Electoral Commission cannot be independent in examining a process in which it had a role to play. Indeed, the Opposition's motion calls either for a duplicate, simultaneous inquiry or for the Electoral Commission to set aside its statutory duty to carry out its review.

Oliver Heald: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

David Cairns: No, I will not.
	The Electoral Commission does not have the discretion to do that. As the hon. Member for Gosport (Peter Viggers), who is not in his place now but was here earlier, pointed out to the House on Monday:
	Parliament has laid on the Electoral Commission two specific sets of responsibilities: one is to assist in the electoral process and advise returning officers, and the other is to report on elections. When the Electoral Commission makes a report and it has itself been involved in the matter in an operational role, it is always its practice to appoint an outside expert to advise on that so that its own role can...be scrutinised.[ Official Report, 21 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 973.]
	However, recognising the degree of public concern that has been expressed, the Electoral Commission has gone further than the appointment of an adviser; it has appointed an outside expert to lead the review.
	Mr. Gould played no part in the Scottish elections, nor did the Electoral Commission staff who will support him. He has issued comprehensive terms of reference. When the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) was asked whether those terms of reference could be added to, he simply could not answer. The common-sense course is surely to let Mr. Gould complete his review so that, in the light of the findings, decisions can be taken about whatever next steps may be necessary or appropriate.
	As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State reminded the House, since 3 May there have been a plethora of calls for all manner of different types of inquiry, including a full judicial inquiry and a commission led by an international political figure such as former President Robinson. Today's Conservative motion asks for an inquiry of an unspecified nature under the joint auspices of the Government and the Scottish Executive. As my right hon. Friend made clear, we are not ruling out further inquiries, but we question the wisdom of setting up a series of simultaneous inquiries to duplicate the work of the statutory inquiry that is already under way. That is why our amendment refers to waiting until the conclusions of Mr. Gould's review are receivedthat is expected to happen in a little over 12 weeksbefore deciding on the next step.
	In the couple of moments that I have left, I want to address some of the issues that have been mentioned during the debate. The hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale twittered on about the demands of natural justice, completing ignoring the fact that his motion allocates responsibility, demands an apology and then at the end asks for an investigation to gather the evidence. The demands of natural justice, about which he waxed eloquent, seem to demand that those things should happen in precisely the opposite order.
	The hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) mentioned decoupling the electionsan issue that was mentioned by a number of hon. Members, including the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald). Sir John Arbuthnott, in particular, has been prayed in aid as somebody who made that recommendation. Let me read into the record Sir John Arbuthnott's recommendation. He said:
	We therefore invite the Scottish Executive to consider the postponement of the 2007 local government elections.
	His specific recommendation was not to this House.  [ Interruption. ] If the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire thinks that that is a lawyer's point, let me read him what the hon. Member for Gosport said:
	the commission recommended that the parliamentary and local elections should not be held on the same day. The decision that they should be held on the same day was taken by the Scottish Executive. [ Official Report, 21 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 975.]
	If the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire wants to raise that matter with the hon. Member for Gosport and accuse him of making lawyers' points, that is his business.
	An entirely legitimate series of issues have been mentionedfrom the design of the ballot paper to the performance of DRS, e-counting in general and postal voting. All those issues fall within the terms of reference of the inquiry to be led by Mr. Gould.

Pete Wishart: Will the Minister give way?

David Cairns: If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will not as am in the last minute of my speech.
	No one has raised a single issue on the Floor of the House that will not be covered by the statutory inquiry that is already under way. The inquiry will examine all the possible factors behind the difficulties experienced at the elections that have been identified. Ministers and officials will co-operate with the inquiry and the report is expected in a little over 12 weeks. That is why the Government's amendment simply asks the House to await the outcome of the statutory review so that its recommendations can inform decisions on whatever next steps might be necessary. The Conservative motion calls for another inquiry that would run simultaneously with the statutory review and duplicate its efforts, but that does not seem to be an especially productive thing to do, which is why I ask the House to support the amendment.

Question put, That the original words stand part of the Question:
	 The House divided: Ayes 160, Noes 329.

Question accordingly negatived.
	 Question, That the proposed words be there added,  put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments), and agreed to.
	Madam Deputy Speaker  forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House notes that a statutory review of the Scottish Parliament elections is already underway conducted by the Electoral Commission as required by Parliament; further notes that, at the prior request of the then Scottish Executive, this review will also cover the Scottish local government elections; welcomes the appointment of an international authority on the management and organisation of elections, Mr Ron Gould, the former Assistant Chief Electoral Officer of Canada, to lead the review; further notes that his terms of reference include examining the role of the Electoral Commission in the preparation of the elections, as well as matters relating to postal ballot delays, the high number of rejected ballots, combining Scottish local government and Scottish parliamentary elections, and the electronic counting process; and believes that this statutory review which is now in progress should complete its report in order to inform decisions in relation to any further steps which may be necessary or appropriate.

John Gummer: On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. We are about to debate a motion tabled by my right hon. and hon. Friends that states:
	the salary of the Secretary of State for Health should be reduced by 1,000.
	I therefore found it surprising that one of the signatories of the amendment is the Secretary of State for Health, who will benefit from the decision, one way or another. That would not be [ Interruption. ]

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I must be able to hear the point of order.

John Gummer: That would not be a matter of importance were it not for the fact that the Secretary of State for Health has personally made a number of statements about the wonders of the national health service, including the fact that is the best service that we have had, and she is being paid for it. I think that it is an unusual circumstance.

Madam Deputy Speaker: The right hon. Gentleman knows the procedure. He is an experienced and senior Member of Parliament, and he knows what the process and the procedures of the House are. It is not unusual for that to happen. We must now proceed.

John Gummer: Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Is the right hon. Gentleman going to pursue the same point of order that he has just raised?

John Gummer: No, Madam Deputy Speaker. You kindly suggested that I have been in the House a long time, but at no point during that period have I ever known any circumstances in which the person under criticism signed the contrary measure. It is a new element, and I seek your advice on the matter.

Madam Deputy Speaker: I remind not only the right hon. Gentleman who raised the point of order but, indeed, all other hon. Members that it is up to each individual Member to judge whether they have a relevant interest that should be declared in any way. That is the norm for the House.

Alan Duncan: On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. In the statement on the energy White Paper this afternoon, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry trumpeted his policy on carbon capture and experiments to achieve it. While he was on his feet, I understand that BP announced that it has withdrawn from what is probably the only carbon capture experiment. Do you have the power, Madam Deputy Speaker, to ask the Secretary of State to come back and explain the apparent contradiction in what he told the House of Commons this afternoon?

Madam Deputy Speaker: I must inform the hon. Gentleman that that is not, in fact, a point of order for the Chair, but his remarks are now on the record.

Secretary of State for Health

Madam Deputy Speaker: We now come to the second debate on the Opposition motions. I must inform the House that Mr. Speaker has selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

Andrew Lansley: I beg to move,
	That the salary of the Secretary of State for Health should be reduced by 1,000.
	The purpose of the motion is to force the resignation of the Secretary of State. I am sorry that it has come to that. Members on both sides of the House will know that we have frequently used the time available to the official Opposition to raise a series of NHS and health-related issues. We have done so on health care-acquired infections, mental health, the NHS work force and planning, and the management of the health service, always on the basis of motions that are constructive and designed to support the national health service. However, NHS staff have reached the end of the line with the Secretary of State. Serial incompetence and a chronic failure to listen to those staff mean that she has no credibility left to resolve the imminent problems facing the national health service. It is not simply that she and the rest of the Government are paralysed by the non-election campaign of the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr. Brown). The fact is that even were she to remain as Secretary of State after a change in prime ministership, she cannot command the necessary confidence and support across the national health service.
	Many Members will recall the matters that we have raised before. Let me reiterate the many serial failures for which the Secretary of State has been responsible over the past two years. In 2005, there was the botched reorganisation of primary care trusts, which led within months to the resignation of Nigel Crisp, now Lord Crisp, as chief executive of the NHS. Under this Secretary of State, we saw the NHS plunge into its largest ever deficit. Since May 2005, the number of staff [ Interruption . ] Labour Members are always telling usthe Prime Minister did it again at Prime Minister's questions todayhow many additional staff have been recruited by the Labour Government. Of course, those include 107,000 administrators. When the Prime Minister says, There have been 250,000 extra staff, funnily enough he never goes on to say, of whom 107,000 are administrators.
	We are focusing on the record of the Secretary of State. Since May 2005, the number of staff working in the national health service has fallen. Payment by results and the tariffa critical element of NHS reformcollapsed in February 2006, weeks before the start of the financial year in which the NHS plunged into its largest ever deficit. In payment by results and the tariff, we have a system that is necessary but is not being delivered successfully.  [ Interruption . ] The Minister for the Cabinet Office says, Ah! as though it is some kind of mystery. Money follows the patient was a policy advocated by the last Conservative Government; it took years for the Labour Government to get round to recognising it, exactly as happened with GP fundholding and market mechanisms inside the NHS.

Tom Levitt: rose

Andrew Lansley: The Labour Government do not understand that it took years to get back to a range of policies that were pioneered by the last Conservative Government. Of course we need money follows the patient and the tariff, but it is still true, all across the NHSas the Secretary of State will have discovered today at the Royal College of Midwives conferencethat the tariff does not support choice, does not support the range of services being provided across the NHS, and discriminates, for example, between normal births conducted in a midwife-led unit and those conducted in a consultant-led unit.

Tom Levitt: rose

Andrew Lansley: We need payment by results and the tariff to be delivered quickly, but what have we had under the Secretary of State? A chronic failure, a collapse in early 2006 [ Interruption . ]

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. It is clear that the hon. Gentleman is not prepared to give way.

Andrew Lansley: I am sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker. I had not even noticed the hon. Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt), but as I have stopped I will give way to him.

Tom Levitt: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. Of course, the Tory Government were no stranger to deficits. Is it not the case that the deficit that he is talking about was smaller, as a proportion of the NHS budget, than many of those that the Tories hadand now it has gone?

Andrew Lansley: The hon. Gentleman does not seem to understand that last year a deficit of more than 1 billion within the NHS masked a deficit in excess of 2 billion within the Department of Health as a whole. That scale of increase has never happened before. The hon. Gentleman and other Labour Members probably often sit there wondering why, in the year just gone, their primary care trusts have had so much of their money top-sliced in order to deal with that deficit. Why did that happen if the deficit is so modest? Why 1.5 billion out of PCT budgets? Why 350 million out of education and training budgets? Why hundreds of millions extra out of the central budgets of the Department of Health? It is all because in the previous year there was not only a gross deficit of 1.3 billion within NHS trusts but an unprecedented scale of overspending within the Department.

Henry Bellingham: Is my hon. Friend aware that the new Norfolk and Norwich PCT started its operations with a massive 50 million deficit? Surely if the Government set up a new organisation going back to where we were 10 years ago, they should at least allow it to start without a deficit.

Andrew Lansley: I understand my hon. Friend's point. Indeed, the same can be said of Cambridgeshire primary care trust, which is, like his, in the east of England. We have the largest deficit proportionately anywhere in the NHS. Of course, there must be a transitional process of trying to deal with those deficits, otherwise the consequences to patients will be unacceptable. Ministers are only now beginning to realise the scale of the deficits.
	Although Ministers are always telling the public about the unprecedented amounts of additional money that are provided to the NHS, the consequence of last year's deficits recurring this year is no growth in resources on the front line of the NHS. That means that, far from growth in services and resources in the past two years, people in the NHS have experienced cuts and reductions.

John Gummer: Does my hon. Friend realise that the Great Yarmouth and Waveney primary care trustwhich was created on the basis that there was previously no deficithas entered into its existence with a special deficit, which the NHS central organisation invented, insisting that the PCT take on board a large sum of money because others have a deficit? Instead of starting deficit free, after working for five years to achieve that, it has to pay back money that it never owed.

Andrew Lansley: My right hon. Friend makes an important point. When Ministers consider the consequences of dealing with deficits, they claim that they have done away with the old system, which they describe as opaque. They say that everything is more transparent now. Conservative Members, who actually speak to members of primary care trusts and others about their financial position, know that the system is anything but transparent. Ministers are still in the business of shifting the money around the NHS to cover up the deficits and, indeed, the consequences.
	Ministers try to cover up the consequences of deficits in places where accident and emergency departmentsfor example, in Surrey, Sussex, Worthing and Enfieldare threatened with closure, not because of genuine clinical cases for change, which the Secretary of State promulgates, but because of financially driven cuts and the consequences of the European working time directive. The Secretary of State has told us more than once that she wished that that directive had been amended. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who is present, promised in 2004 that it would be amended to tackle its worst aspects. He told us that services to patients in the NHS would not suffer as a consequence of the implementation of the directive. Yet maternity units in Manchester and A and E departments in the south of England are being shut precisely because of the failure in December 2006 to amend the working time directive, as the Government had promised.
	What about the NHS IT programme? It began before the current Secretary of State was in charge but the implementation remains disastrous.

Andrew Miller: Unfortunately, no Conservative Member who is present today attended a meeting that I had the honour to chair last night to discuss the NHS IT programme. Let me pass on two figures from that. This week, the picture archiving and communications system stored 6,200,000 images, making a total of 237 million images stored on the system. The hon. Gentleman calls that a failurehe should get his facts right and learn a little bit about IT.

Andrew Lansley: Oh dear. The hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well that digital imaging and the transfer of digital images happened before the NHS IT programme got going.

Andrew Miller: rose

Andrew Lansley: I shall not give way to the hon. Gentleman again.  [Interruption.] Five years ago, Addenbrooke's hospital told me that it was doing that already, but its problem was that it had to go at the same pace [Interruption.]

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. The House must come to order.

Andrew Miller: rose

Andrew Lansley: I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman shortly, but let me tell him something else if he is interested in the IT programme. He will remember that, 10 days ago, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said that we had to deliver the electronic transfer of prescriptions. By the end of 2005, 50 per cent. of prescriptions were supposed to be delivered electronically. By now, the figure should have approached 100 per cent. Yet the last quarter for which figures are available shows that 4 per cent. of prescriptions were transferred electronically. Actually, it is worse than that: about 4,500,000 prescriptions were issued electronically, but only just over 1 per cent. of those issued could be dispensed electronically because bar codes had not been fitted to them and pharmacists did not have access to the necessary equipment.

Andrew Miller: rose

Andrew Lansley: I will give way again to the hon. Gentleman if he will explain why the Secretary of State has not delivered what the Chancellor is calling for.

Andrew Miller: Had the hon. Gentleman attended the meeting last night, he would have seen that more than 8,000 practices are now involved in the choose and book system.  [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman might like to put himself in my position as a patient. I have seen the system working. The IT system is working, and contractors are delivering up and down the country. He is doing a disservice not only to the best IT programme in the world, but to the 350,000 people working in the NHS.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman knows that interventions must be brief.

Andrew Lansley: It is always a help if interventions are accurate. The hon. Gentleman mentions choose and book, which is a classic example: it is two years late; GPs have not been listened to with regard to its implementation; and the target was for 90 per cent. of appointments to be made through choose and book by now, but the latest figure is 38 per cent., and half of those were done on the telephone, not online. His intervention is therefore rubbish.
	Let us deal quickly with the implementation of contracts. The consultants contract did not deliver productivity and went over budget. The GP contract did not deliver the access that the Chancellor of the Exchequer now apparently wants. As for cutting GPs out of out-of-hours care, the cost was a quarter of a billion pounds more than estimated, and it has turned into a shambles. The dental contract, which was described by the British Dental Association as a shambles, has reduced and limited access to NHS dentistry.
	On public health, the Secretary of State has been attacked by the chief medical officer over public health budgets being raided to deal with deficits. After the publication of the White Paper, prior to the Secretary of State taking up her position, it took two years to agree a definition of childhood obesity, and the Government have now resorted simply to measuring children. No actions or interventions are to follow.

Meg Hillier: It is instructive about the pace of change in the health service that, in 1997, people were waiting two years even to get an operation. They might be waiting now, but only for improvements in what is already a damned sight better service than we had 10 years ago.

Andrew Lansley: If we look at the hospital episode statistics, I acknowledge that the proportion of patients waiting less than six months for operations increased from 84 per cent. in 1997 to 90 per cent. in 2006. Given that NHS budgets have tripled, however, that is not exactly a triumph.
	The flu vaccine implementation has been delayed twice in each of the past two years, and the Government have now missed the World Health Organisation's target for delivering flu vaccine to over-65-year-olds. When the Secretary of State took up her position, she said that hospital-acquired infections would be her priority. What has she done about it? We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of deaths associated with MRSA and clostridium difficile, and horrendous outbreaks of C. difficile in a number of hospitals across the country, including in her constituency.
	We have also seen the Secretary of State in the humiliating position of having to admit, in early December, that whereas Ministers said that 99 per cent. of patients were admitted to single-sex accommodation, some people might still be getting admitted to mixed-sex wards. She asked for a report from health authorities across the country. It took her six months to admit, because the Healthcare Commission survey was going to present it anyway, that 22 per cent. of patients admitted to hospital were first admitted to mixed-sex wards. That was a complete failure on something that, as her Prime Minister said in 1996, cannot be beyond the wit of Government to achieve.

Angela Smith: If things really are as bad as the hon. Gentleman makes out, how is it that we have enjoyed significant reductions in the levels of heart disease in cities like Sheffield and elsewhere?

Andrew Lansley: The Prime Minister said at Prime Minister's questions today, and it is stated in the amendment, that 200,000 lives have been saved by a continuing reduction in premature mortality from heart disease and cancer. That is true, and it is a testament to the work of staff right across the NHS. But if Members go back to  Hansard of 27 November 2006, they will find that a member of the Front-Bench team asked what would have been the number of lives saved under the last Conservative Government, applying the same measure of the reduction in premature mortality. The answer was that, in respect of cardiovascular disease, between 1978 and 1996 535,000 lives were saved. In respect of cancer over the same period, 65,000 lives were saved. That adds up to 610,000 lives saved under the last Conservative Government on exactly the same measure as the Government say that 200,000 lives have been saved.
	What does that prove? It proves, as we have always said, that the staff of the NHS are delivering an improving service every year. The point of the debate is that they know that that improvement in the service that they provide is not the result of decisions of the Secretary of State. It is not the result of what the Government have done. It is not even entirely the result of resources provided to the national health service, as staff achieved an improvement in thick years and thin.
	Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said:
	In the 1980s and 90s finance was extremely tight but you did not get the crisis we have seen in the last two years.
	Every year the NHS is improving and its staff are delivering better services, but they have no confidence in the way that they have been subjected to the serial failures and mismanagement by the Government.

Stephen Dorrell: Although it is undoubtedly welcome that we have seen improvements in premature mortality from cancer both under the last Government and under the present Government, will my hon. Friend reflect on the fact that, despite spending on health care in this country being in line with European averages, premature mortality from cancer in this country is running about 40 per cent. higher than in France, Germany or Italy? Should we not be comparing the performance of our health care system with other comparable systems elsewhere in Europe?

Andrew Lansley: Yes. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. That is indeed what should happen. I say we advisedly. On both sides, we should look at outcomes, whereas the Government are obsessed with targets that deliver processes, not outcomes.
	At Prime Minister's questions at lunchtime, the Prime Minister said that there was a survey which showed that the health service in the UK was better than anywhere else. Try telling that to people who have lung cancer, who find that there are half a dozen PET scanners in this country and 500 in Germany. Try telling that to a stroke patient who finds that there a few dozen places in this country where one can have immediate thrombolysis for stroke, but in Australia that is routine. We deliver 0.3 per cent. of appropriate patients thrombolysis for stroke. In Australia the figure is 10 per cent.

Dari Taylor: Is the hon. Gentleman seriously telling the House that the 35,000 extra doctors and 80,000 extra nurses are not delivering an improvement in health care? That is how it sounds.

Andrew Lansley: The hon. Lady need not take it from me. The general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing [Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Lady asked a question of the Opposition spokesman. Perhaps she ought to listen to the answer.

Andrew Lansley: I am grateful, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said:
	In the 1980s and 90s finance was extremely tight but you did not get the crisis we have seen in the last two years.
	He also said, as my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition said at lunchtime, that money comes into the national health service but too much gets wasted. Staff right across the NHS are saying that they are trying to make progress but cannot because of the Government's failures.

Several hon. Members: rose

Andrew Lansley: I am going to make some progress.
	The latest and one of the most serious failures of the Secretary of State has been the disaster of the medical training application scheme. The Royal College of Physicians called it
	the worst episode in the history of medical training in the UK in living memory.
	James Johnson, who has resigned as chairman of the British Medical Association, described the policy failuresfailure to estimate the number of applicants correctly, failure to put in place a fair selection process by adopting selection criteria and a scoring system that undermined the principles of Modernising Medical Careers and failure to implement the technology in terms of its security or its functionality. Furthermore, Mr. Justice Goldring said in the High Court this afternoon:
	The fact that the claimant
	Remedy UK
	has failed in what was accepted to be an unprecedented application so far as the law is concerned does not mean that many junior doctors do not have an entirely justifiable sense of grievance. The premature introduction of MTAS has had disastrous consequences. It was a flawed system.
	That is a flawed system introduced by this Government with consequences so disastrous as to lead the chairman of the BMA, the national director of Modernising Medical Careers and the national clinical director of MMC all to resign, yet the Secretary of State sits there ignorant and oblivious to the consequences of what she has done.

Rob Marris: I would like to take the hon. Gentleman back a little to when he was talking about a crisis. Can he tell the House when there was last a winter bed crisis in the NHS?

Andrew Lansley: From my recollectionI am sure that I will be corrected if I am wrongit was 1999. That was the last time that there was a substantial bout of flu. We have been lucky [Interruption.] Given that the Government failed to deliver flu vaccine at the right time, if we had had a substantial outbreak of seasonal flu at any point in the late autumn in either of the last two years, it would have had serious consequences.

Graham Stuart: Following the last piercing question from the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris) and my hon. Friend's answer that the last time that we had a winter bed crisis was under this Labour Government, will my hon. Friend now answer another question? When was the last time that we saw a sustained improvement in productivity in the NHS?

Andrew Lansley: The answer is in the mid-1990s. There has been a sustained reduction in productivity in the NHS since 1997, estimated by the Office for National Statistics as up to 1.3 per cent. a year.
	The purpose of the motion is to give the NHS the management and leadership it needs. Frankly, that can be delivered only through a general election, but some things could be done now that are not getting done because the Government are not only divided, but paralysed and inactive. We need an end to the closure of accident and emergency departments and maternity services. They are not a result of a clinical demand for change, but are being driven by short-term financial considerations and the impact of the working time directive. For two months I have been asking the Secretary of State for more training posts for junior doctors, but she has consistently failed to get on with delivering them.

Evan Harris: rose

Kali Mountford: rose

Andrew Lansley: I give way to the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris)

Evan Harris: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the problems of training posts for junior doctors extend beyond the software of MTAS? There is a fundamental mismatch between the number of junior doctors looking for training posts and the number of posts available because consultant expansion has failed and there are not enough training programmes coming through. Does he accept that it does not make sense to plan medical students, plan house officers, plan senior house officers and plan registrars without planning for the end product, which is consultant posts?

Andrew Lansley: The hon. Gentleman participated fully in the Opposition debate on 24 April, which explored those issues. The short answer is that it makes no sense to have work force planningthe Government's approach was described by the Health Select Committee as boom and bustto set up the structures of medical training and to deliver large numbers of trainee doctors at a time when consultant posts are being abandoned because of financial deficits. Equally, it makes no sense to have junior doctors, costing 250,000 to train, who are then going to be without posts and who will abandon medicine and leave this country as a consequence of the Government's failures.
	We also need an independent review of the NHS information technology scheme.

Kali Mountford: rose

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I do not think that the hon. Gentleman intends to give way for the time being. Until he indicates otherwise, the hon. Lady may resume her seat.

Andrew Lansley: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
	We need a re-engagement of GPs with, for example, out-of-hours services. That is perfectly possible, but it will never happen while the Secretary of State is in place or if the Chancellor of the Exchequer carries on trying to engage in confrontation with the medical profession, rather than co-operation.
	We need to abolish the central targets that undermine clinical priorities. NHS staff, particularly those in the medical profession, deeply resent the fact that the Government constantly dictate to them in that way, despite the fact that they are senior professionals. We need a fairer funding mechanism, because funding allocations have directly contributed to the impact of deficits across the country. We also need a Government who are prepared to accept the underlying good sense of many of the amendments made to the Mental Health Bill by the House of Lords, rather than persisting with their present approach to the Bill.
	This Secretary of State has lost the confidence not only of the NHS but of many others with whom she has worked. Professor Halligan, the former deputy chief medical officer, has said that the NHS has
	a leadership void, which has caused it to lose its way.
	Andrew Foster, the former director of human resources for the Department, has spoken of
	a growing lack of confidence in the leadership
	of the Department [ Interruption. ]

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. We must not have interventions from a sedentary position. Hon. Members would expect the Secretary of State to be given a fair hearing when she comes to address the House. They should extend the same courtesy to the hon. Gentleman.

Andrew Lansley: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I remember that Sir Thomas More was a Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, so, when it comes to it, perhaps decapitation is one approach to the problem.
	Senior civil servants in the Department of Health were surveyed, and 84 per cent. did not believe that the Department was well managed. Professor Crockard, who is retiring as national director of MMC, said of MTAS:
	From my point of view, this project has lacked clear leadership from the top for a very long time.
	The Secretary of State has been jeered by nurses, and heckled by midwives only today. A unanimous vote among junior doctors at a BMA conference called on her to resign. James Johnson chose to resign as chairman of the BMA. All that he did, so far as I can see, was to stand between an angry medical profession and the Secretary of State. He said:
	It is the worst I have known it for over 30 years.
	NHS staff are continuing to deliver for patients. They are professionals, but they are not being treated professionally by the Government. They are angry because of the way in which they have been treated. The Government tell them that money is flowing, but they do not see it, and they are not given the chance to shape the care that they give to patients. They are angry because the Government are constantly telling them how to do their job, even though the Government are incompetent at doing their own.
	The Secretary of State has been responsible for so-called NHS reform, but there is no coherent reform. Staff in the NHS do not know what is happening, why it is happening or where it is going. There is no inspirational leadershipthere is not even competent managementbut there are urgent tasks to be done. Even the Secretary of State's own colleagues in the Government do not believe that she is capable of achieving those things, or that she will be responsible for doing so. The next Prime Minister will not keep her. The present Prime Minister would not defend her today. But the NHS needs change now. We should take charge, but we cannot. If there will not be a new Government, there must at least be a new Secretary of State, and that should happen now. I commend the motion to the House.

Patricia Hewitt: I beg to move, To leave out from House to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
	believes that there is no need to reduce the salary of the Secretary of State for Health at a time when patient satisfaction is increasing, with nine out of ten in-patients saying their care has been good, very good or excellent, waiting times are at their lowest since records began, an extra 200,000 lives have been saved from heart disease and cancer since 1996 and investment in the NHS is being trebled by 2008.
	In view of the motion, perhaps I should declare my interestalthough it is almost worth 1,000 to have been able to listen to that defence of what passes for Tory policy on the NHS.
	It is one of the greatest privileges in our country to be Secretary of State for Health, a privilege that carries with it enormous responsibilities. I believe that every one of my predecessors, in both parties, has felt the same. But I also believe that the real privilege is to be a Labour Health Secretary in a reforming Labour Government. In the past two years, I have sought to discharge those responsibilities not only on behalf of the Government as a whole but, above all, on behalf of the patients and the public who elected us into government in three successive general elections. I welcome this debate, as I welcome every opportunity to set out the Government's record on health.

Graham Stuart: Will the Secretary of State give way?

Patricia Hewitt: Not yet.
	The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) specifically mentioned junior doctors. I welcome today's High Court decision to reject the findings of the judicial review initiated by Remedy UK. We are looking carefully at the comments of Mr. Justice Goldring, and I will make a statement to the House tomorrow on how we will fulfil our responsibilities to trainee doctors as we complete this year's recruitment to more training places than there have ever been before.

Norman Lamb: Will the Secretary of State give way?

Patricia Hewitt: Not on that point, no. I will deal with it in my oral statement tomorrow.
	The most important judges and the single most important test of the state of the NHS are the patients who use the service every day of the week. I find it extraordinary that the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire scarcely mentioned them. Only last week, the Healthcare Commission published its latest national survey of patients. Nine out of 10 recent hospital patients said that their care had been good, very good or excellentan even better result than just a year ago. What a tribute it is to the dedication and hard work of NHS staff that, in a year when very difficult decisions had to be made to return the NHS to financial balance, the level of patients' satisfaction with their hospital care went up, not down.

Nicholas Soames: The debate is not about national health service nurses, who do a magnificent job; it is about the right hon. Lady and the great misfortunes that she has brought to the health service. Will she consider the real worries of the constituents of Members in all parts of the House in south-east England, where reconfigurations are proving impossible? They are taking so long that they cannot even be brought forward. The right hon. Lady should understand that the motion is directed not against the nurses, but against her stewardship of the NHS.

Patricia Hewitt: I will take no lectures from a party that starved the NHS of funds and left patients waiting 18 months or more for desperately needed operations.

Simon Burns: Will the Secretary of State give way?

Patricia Hewitt: No. I want to make some progress before I give way again.
	It is no accident that patients are more satisfied with their hospitals. Of course, that is down to the staff. There are well over a quarter of a million more doctors, nurses and other NHS staffan increase made possible by our reforms and investment, which the Conservative party opposed every inch of the way.

Rob Marris: Does my right hon. Friend share my astonishment that the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) suggested today, in response to an intervention from me, that the absence of winter bed crises during this century was due to luck? Surely it is due to the resurrection of the NHS by this Government, with preventive programmes such as bowel cancer screening, osteoporosis screening and flu jabs for pensioners. That is not due to luck. It is due to sound policies, backed by staff, resources and visionpolicies opposed by the Conservatives, whose own policies would decimate the NHS in deprived cities such as Wolverhampton.

Patricia Hewitt: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was shown around the brilliant accident and emergency department at St Helens and Knowsley Trust by Graeme Inkster, one of the emergency consultants, who explained to me exactly why we do not have winter bed crises now. He showed me what he called the corridor of shame, which 10 years ago was full of patients lying on trolleys waiting for hours on end. He said that he used to come into work first thing on a Monday morning and find patients queuing in the corridor; they had been left over from the weekend because there had not been anybody to treat them. Some of them had been there for six, 12 or 18 hours. The hospitals did not have the money or the staff, and they had not reorganised the care around the patients. The investment we put in and the reforms we madeand the four-hour accident and emergency target, which the Opposition opposeddrove the changes that led to us ensuring that we do not have winter beds crises.

Simon Burns: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way. As she will not take any lessons from the Conservative party, will she take lessons from the Royal College of Nursing, the junior doctors and the consultants, who all think that her stewardship has been a disaster?

Patricia Hewitt: Of course I listen to staff. I listened this morning to the midwives at the Royal College of Midwives, who gave me several examples of why we need to do more in terms of maternity services. That is why we worked with the RCM to produce the action plan, Maternity Matters: choice, access and continuity of care in a safe service, which was published recently. However, what I do that the hon. Gentleman does not do is also listen to the staff and the patients throughout the country, who show me the superb care that is taking placeand which never gets into the headlines and which we never hear about from the Opposition.

Andrew Gwynne: This point is not only to do with patient satisfactionnine out of 10 of them are satisfied with the NHS. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the picture painted by the Opposition does not fit with the findings of the Commonwealth Fund's international survey, which shows that our NHS is one of the best health services in the world?

Patricia Hewitt: My hon. Friend is right. That latest survey by the independent Commonwealth Fund confirms what patients are saying. It looked at the health service in Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United States of America and the UK. Four years ago, it rated the NHS as number three, and two years ago it was still number three, but according to the latest survey the NHS is now number oneit is the fairest, the most efficient and the best overall.

Kali Mountford: Is it not also the case that although specialists tell us one thing, sometimes the community wants something different? Sometimes specialists say to us that they want all services in one place. In my community, they wanted one specialist care maternity service and a midwife-led unit. We now have 30 million investment in community service hospitals. As a result, Holme valley hospitalwhich had been threatened with closure in 1997 and has been built up under this Governmentwill now provide even more hospital services to our community, so we now have both services.

Patricia Hewitt: My hon. Friend is right. I pay tribute to her for the leadership role that she played in ensuring that the voice of her constituents was heard. I also pay tribute to the clinicians. They said, If we reorganise the services it will be safer and better for patients. They were also listened to.

John Redwood: Can the Secretary of State explain why so many patients have been dying of killer bugs on her watch?

Patricia Hewitt: Hospital-acquired infection is a serious issue. We take it very seriously and we were the first Government to require every hospital to record cases of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and C. difficile and to report that publicly. Therefore, we know the exact nature of the problem and we can hold hospitals and their boards to account for getting those rates down. I am glad to be able to say that MRSA rates are falling, but there is a new strain of C. difficile. It is not only a problem in Britain; it is causing problems in many health services and we must do more to protect patients from it.
	It is unsurprising that hospital patients are more satisfied as the waiting lists are lower than they have ever beenalmost nobody is waiting more than six months for the sort of operation for which people used to wait two years. That happened because we put in more moneyopposed by the Conservatives. But we did not put more money into the old ways of doing things, we put more money into new and better ways of caring for patients. At Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust, which I visited a few weeks ago, I met the staff who had reorganised the service, and found that with no further funding increase they could care for six orthopaedic patients in the time that previously they had been able to care for only one. They slashed the waiting time for MRI scans from two years to just a few weeks. That is investment and reform in action.

Graham Stuart: Can the Secretary of State explain why children in my constituency with major jaw problems are waiting more than 60 weeks from first going to see their GP until receiving treatment? That figure is not collected centrally, but from local information they have to wait more than a year.

Patricia Hewitt: For the first time ever in the history of the NHS we are now collecting information on how long it takes for a patient to go from GP referral to actual treatment. We have got the waiting times for the first out-patient appointment down, and we have got the waiting times down at the other end for the in-patient treatment. Now what we are going to doand I hope that the hon. Gentleman will support itis ensure that for almost all patients and almost all conditions there will be no more than 18 weeks maximum from referral to treatment. For many people, the wait will be even shorter.
	Let us take the example of Shepton Mallet treatment centre. I went there and talked to patients, including the chair of one of the local primary care trustsa Labour chair, as it happens. At that treatment centre, patients see the consultant, have the scans and tests, get the diagnosis, decide on the operation and book the date for the operationall in one visit. That never used to happen. Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has also changed its way of working and will now be one of the first hospitals in the country to deliver a maximum of 18 weeks for almost all of its patients. That is investment and reform in practice.

Meg Hillier: The Conservatives seem to be confused about the role of the Secretary of State. The Government should make the hard decisions about future funding and stability for the NHS and set tough targets, but they should leave the practitioners to run things. The Conservatives keep raising individual examples of particular treatments. Is it really the Secretary of State's role to determine what happens in every hospital ward?

Patricia Hewitt: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is one of the many contradictions in the Conservatives' so-called health policy that they want independence for the NHS, but they oppose every proposal from local NHS staff for a reorganisation of services. Whenever something goes wrong or they want more money for their own local hospitalas so many Tory Members dothey come straight to me and demand that I intervene. It is completely bizarre.
	Over and over again, we see that the best care for patients, organised around them, is also the best value for patients' money. That is why I was so determined that we dealt with the overspending in a minority of hospitals, restored the NHS as a whole to financial balance and ended the unfair system of well managed hospitals in some of the most disadvantaged parts of the country having to bail out the minority of overspenders. It went on for years, it was not fair or efficient, and we stopped it. Of course, that was difficultespecially for NHS staffbut we now have the fairest, strongest and most transparent financial system that the NHS has ever had. That is not my verdict, but that of the  Health Service Journal, which said that
	the changes to the financial system brought about during her time will prove a lasting legacy.

Grant Shapps: Does the Secretary of State provide the same advice to the right hon. Member for Salford (Hazel Blears), chair of the Labour party, when she complains about closures in her constituency?

Patricia Hewitt: That was not worth giving way for, I am afraid.
	As I said a moment ago, we needed that four-hour A and E target to change what was happening in A and E. Now, the 18-week target is mobilising NHS staff in hospitals all around the country to end the waiting that has been part of the NHS for nearly 60 years. What an achievement that will bewhat a birthday present for the NHS, as it ends waiting, as NHS patients have always known it, on its 60th anniversary.
	The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire is against the 18-week target. That is hardly surprising; he thought that 18 months and more was acceptable.

John Mann: After visiting a GP, one member of my family had to wait only three weeks for cancer surgery; another member of my family went into hospital with terminal cancer and spent 10 hours on a hospital trolley in a corridor. Can the Secretary of State guess which experience took place under the John Major Tory Government and which took place under this Labour Government?

Patricia Hewitt: My hon. Friend makes his point very graphically. That is another real tribute not only to NHS staff and the new cancer networks, but to the targetthe promise that we madethat patients diagnosed with cancer would wait a maximum of 62 days between an urgent GP referral and the start of cancer treatment. Just two years ago, fewer than two thirds of patients were getting from diagnosis to treatment so quickly; now more than 95 per cent. are. There have been real improvements in the past two years.
	Most important of all, the NHS is saving more people's lives. The lives of nearly 150,000 people with coronary heart disease have been saved. The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire had something to say on that subject. It is perfectly true that under the Conservative Government, death rates from coronary heart disease were falling, but they were falling a great deal more slowly than in most other parts of Europe, and have been falling faster since. I looked at the numbers. During the 1980s, those death rates fell by about 20 per cent.; during the 1990s, they fell by 26 per cent. During the years of this Labour Government, they fell by 36 per cent., and we will meet early our target for a 40 per cent. reduction in those death rates. Furthermore, 50,000 more lives have been saved as a result of our changes to cancer care, and suicide rates are at their lowest level ever because of our changes to mental health services.
	The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Mental Health Bill, which is going through Parliament. Since 1959, we have had a law under which a seriously suicidal mentally ill patient can, if the clinician judges it necessary to protect them from self-harm or suicide, be detained in hospital for treatment. We have discussed that recently. I find it extraordinary that the Conservative party should now want to end that provision and deny seriously suicidal patients the possibility of treatment from which they have benefited for decades.

David Kidney: Will my right hon. Friend accept the credit for giving greater responsibility to more NHS staff, such as nurse consultants and nurse prescribers? Will she reaffirm our party's commitment to extend the same approach to mental health services? We want more members of mental health teams to have responsibility. We do not want to look back and defend vested interests, as the other place did with the support of the Conservative party.

Patricia Hewitt: My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point and I hope that it is one on which the Opposition will think again.

Evan Harris: Would the right hon. Lady care to comment on the extent to which changes in coronary heart disease death rates are affected by changes in smoking habits made 10 or 15 years earlier? The improvements in the Tory years could have been due to changes in smoking habits 10 or 15 years previously, and some of the changes we are experiencing now could also be due to earlier lifestyle changes. Does the right hon. Lady accept that the long time lag means that the situation on death rates is not as simple as some people make out?

Patricia Hewitt: The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, although Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, stresses the point that the impact of smoking, including second-hand smoke, can show up extremely quicklywithin a year or twoin coronary heart disease. Part of the improvements we have been making in the NHS is the much bigger investment in stop smoking services, which have helped more than 1.5 million people to give up smoking. The smoke-free legislation, supported on both sides of the House, will be the biggest step forward for public health for decades.
	Of course change is difficultwe are changing from the old public sector monopoly to a patient-led NHS. It is not easy, but we have to do it to meet the huge challenges of an ageing population, people's rising expectations, new drugs, changes in medical technology and an epidemic of lifestyle diseases. We have to change the way the NHS works to safeguard what is most precious and enduring about it: the values of a health service that is paid for by all of us, available to each of us on the basis of clinical need and free at the point of usethe values we believe in on the Labour Benches.

Crispin Blunt: I think that the Secretary of State betrayed herself earlier in her speech when she talked about a Labour chair of a PCT. I thought such people were meant to leave their politics behind when they discharged their duties to the NHS. However, our experience is reflected in a gerrymandered decision about the sites of hospitals in the south of my constituency, which drove the Surrey and Sussex Healthcare Trust into the largest deficit in the country under her predecessor. That was followed by her gerrymandered decision for a hospital at the St. Helier site in the face of recommendations. She was driven off only because the decision was so unreasonable that it would not stand up to judicial review. It is because the Secretary of State has put the political interests of the Labour party first that she should resign.

Patricia Hewitt: The hon. Gentleman is talking absolute nonsense. Appointments to primary care trusts are made by a completely independent statutory appointments commission. I cannot remember whether the Conservatives supported its establishment, but it is completely independent. Far from people being ashamed of their politics, if people in his party, my party or any other party are active, they declare it, but it makes no difference whatever to the appointments system.

Several hon. Members: rose

Patricia Hewitt: No, I shall not give way

John Bercow: rose

Patricia Hewitt: But I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman because I have considerable respect for him.

John Bercow: I am extremely grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way.
	In September 2006, in response to protests, the Secretary of State rightly instructed that the consultation process on the future of the Nuffield speech and language unit should be undertaken again. Given that eight months lateron 16 May, to be precisethe representatives on the new steering group from the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and the Association for All Speech Impaired Children resigned their membership of that group on the ground that they did not wish to be associated with substandard work, will the right hon. Lady agree to meet me and a number of concerned parents and professionals, recognising, as she will, that the interests of highly vulnerable children are at stake?

Patricia Hewitt: Of course I will.
	We have believed in the values of the NHS ever since we created it. The Conservative party now claims to believe in those same values, but we are entitled to look at the Conservatives' actions, as well as their words. For 18 years, they starved the NHS of funds and took money out of the NHS to subsidise private health care for a few.

Peter Lilley: Will the Secretary of State give way?

Patricia Hewitt: No, I will not give way again.
	That is exactly the policy that the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) put into his party's manifesto just two years ago. The Conservatives voted against the extra money that we are putting into the national health servicemore than 8 billion more in this year aloneand they opposed the changes in local services that will benefit patients.

Neil Turner: The Conservative party has prayed in aid the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Midwives and the British Medical Association in its criticism of the Secretary of State. In the conversations that she has had with those bodies, have they asked to return to the staffing and funding levels of 1997?

Patricia Hewitt: My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. Frankly, the message to NHS staff that we are hearing from Conservative Members is, You don't need more money because you would have made the improvements anyway, so you don't need the extra staff or the higher pay and we won't give you a decent public service pension either.
	Two days ago, the right hon. Member for Witney set out his seven-point policy for the NHS. His first point was
	an immediate stop to the closure of AE and maternity services.
	Well, of course that is what he is saying. He wants the headlines. He loves the demonstrations and the marches. But let us look [ Interruption. ] Conservative Members should take note of the small print of what their party leader said. He said that the changes should be suspended
	Until there is clear clinical...evidence.
	Those are weasel words from a Tory leader who says different things to different people and who will say anything at all if he thinks that it will please. He simply will not face up to the difficult policy challenges that confront our country. I have the clinical evidence in my hand and the right hon. Gentleman knows that it exists.

Peter Lilley: rose

Patricia Hewitt: Professor Sir George Alberti and Professor Roger Boyle

Hon. Members: Give way.

Patricia Hewitt: I will give way to the right hon. Gentleman.

Peter Lilley: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way. On the subject of weasel words, does she understand why Opposition Members sometimes find it difficult to put full credence in all the figures that she uses? That was illustrated yesterday, when she told my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Miss Kirkbride), who asked about the recruitment of nurses from Africa, that, because of the Government's uniquely ethical policy,
	we do not take nurses from...Africa.[ Official Report, 22 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 1089.]
	When I pointed out that the Government have issued 50,000 work permits for nurses from Africa since 2000, her defence was that it did not really count because they came in via agencies rather than directly to the NHS and that that was difficult to stop. Can she tell us what is uniquely ethical about circumventing one's promises in that way and telling the House that we do not take nurses from Africa when we have given out 50,000 work permits? Why is that so difficult to stop when it is the Government who give out the work permits?

Patricia Hewitt: The right hon. Gentleman should talk to Health Ministers in the Governments in Africa, with whom we have reached agreements on that very point. Let me also remind him that only last year we took nursing jobs off the skills shortage list in order to ensure that the jobs went to nurses here.
	The point that I want to make about the clinical evidence for changes in services is that, as the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire knows full well, in the case of the most serious emergenciesfor instance, strokes and heart attacksit is much better to bypass the local hospital and be taken straight to a specialist centre, where the specialist staff and equipment are ready 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Close to home wherever safely possible and in a specialist centre where necessarythat is what clinicians are telling us. If the NHS can do that, each year we can save 500 more lives, prevent another 1,000 heart attacks and support more than 1,000 stroke victims to regain their independence, rather than being condemned to lasting disability. That is the clinical evidence. Rather than giving us weasel words, the Conservative party should be supporting clinicians in making the case for change.
	If we know that changing services will allow us to improve and save more lives, we would be betraying patients and the NHS if we refused to make those changes just because they were difficult. Leadership is about listening to clinicians, supporting them in making the case for change, involving local councillors and people in consultation, and then having the courage to back the NHS in making the right decision.

Andrew Lansley: The Secretary of State waved around Sir George Alberti's document on emergency access. He has told colleagues in West Sussex that for an accident and emergency department to be maintained, it must have a catchment populationhe used the curious term drainage populationof between 400,000 and 500,000 people. Does the Secretary of State think that that clinical view should be applied throughout the countryyes or no?

Patricia Hewitt: Professor Alberti has said consistently that the most specialist services need a larger catchment area.

Andrew Lansley: Does the right hon. Lady agree with him?

Patricia Hewitt: Of course I agree with him that for the most serious [ Interruption. ] The hon. Gentleman was complaining earlier that he wanted better stroke services. He knows perfectly well that that means changes to local A and E departments and hospitals and some services moving from local A and E departments and hospitals to specialist centres. Of course I support Professor Sir George Alberti and Roger Boyle in arguing for precisely that, and that is what the hon. Gentleman should be doing, instead of organising a human chain to save a hospital that was never under the threat of closure and then telling the local newspaper that the right way forward for Hinchingbrooke hospital might be for its A and E department to deal with self-referrals and for the more serious cases to go somewhere else, such as Addenbrooke's. His comments about Hinchingbrooke to his local paper are what he describes nationally as the closure of a local A and E department.

Andrew Lansley: Look, just for the sake of accuracy, let me say that a consultation is under way on Hinchingbrooke hospitalit is in my neighbouring constituency of Huntingdon, but it serves part of my constituencyand one of the options is the closure of the hospital.

Patricia Hewitt: The local primary care trust and the hospital have made it perfectly clear that the right way forward, in their judgment, is a reorganisation of services that the hon. Gentleman claims to support one minute, yet describes the next minute as an outrage and a closure.
	For the past 10 years, we have had a Prime Minister who has had the courage to make difficult decisions and has never shied away from difficult arguments. We have had a Chancellor who has had the courage to take the difficult decision to increase national insurance contributions and give the NHS the money that it needed. It was this party that created the NHS, although the Conservatives voted against it, and it was this Government who saved the NHS from ruin 10 years ago and put in the funding, although the Tories voted against it. It is this Government who will go on listening to staff and, above all, patients. We will make changes when they need to be made and improve services that still need improvement. We will back the NHS and improve it so that it is the fairest and best service in the world.

Norman Lamb: The Liberal Democrats will support the motion this evening because of the palpable loss of confidence in the Secretary of State, especially with regard to her handling of the junior doctors shamblesa subject to which I shall return. However, to some extent the right hon. Lady is a sacrificial lamb [ Interruption. ] I thought the House would like that. She is a sacrificial lamb for the failings of the Government's stewardship of the national health service; others should take their share of the responsibility.
	The extent to which confidence in this Government's stewardship of the NHS has collapsed is remarkable. There has been record investment, which we supported, and some genuine progress has been made, yet both the public and health professionals have lost faith. Just this month, a Newsnight poll found that, in relation to the NHS, Labour was the least trusted party. The Liberal Democrats came top. [Hon. Members: What a surprise.] I acknowledge that straight away. It is remarkable that, despite the Labour party's record of supporting the NHS over the years, it is now bottom in terms of public trust in handling the NHS. What has gone so badly wrong?
	Plenty of people other than the Secretary of State ought to appear on the charge sheetfor a start, the Tories. When they were in government, there were years of chronic under-investment in the NHS. In 1997, when the Conservative party left government, investment in the NHS was 6.8 per cent. of gross domestic product 33 per cent. less than the EU average. Given that we were spending a third less than the rest of Europe, it was no wonder that people had to wait interminably for operations. I remember people coming to see me who were waiting for hip and knee-joint operations, sometimes for three years from the first referral to the point at which they had their operation. That is not a world to which we want to return. It was no wonder that the infrastructure of the NHSthe buildingswas worn out and so much investment was needed. In addition, not enough doctors or nurses were being trained or employed in the NHS.
	The cumulative impact of that under-investment in the service that could be provided was massive. Let us compare our experience in the UK with that in the rest of Europe. In many countries elsewhere in Europe, waiting is simply not an issue. Never mind getting down to a maximum wait of 18 weeks next year; the fact is that people in many countries do not experience waits for operations. One has to take into account the massive head start that other countries have had because of their historically far higher funding for their health service than we have had in this country.
	In 2002, this Parliament came to the point at which we decided whether to vote for increased investment in our NHS. Even after being turned out of government, the Conservatives voted against that increased investment. Had they had their way, cumulatively over the ensuing period we would have had 35 billion less to invest in the NHS. Just imagine the closure of hospitals that we would be experiencing without that money! At the last election, their plan was to drain money out of the NHS to subsidise private health carethat was stated in a manifesto drafted by the Conservative leader before he changed his mind. We need to remember that record of what the Conservatives did, both when they were in government and when we reached the point of voting on increased investment in the NHS.

Stephen Dorrell: In the spirit of setting the record straight, which is what the hon. Gentleman is trying to do, he might like to remember that although the 2002 tax increase was branded by the Chancellor as money required for the NHS, well over half of it was spent on the social security budget. The assertion made was simply untrue. The hon. Gentleman should not line up behind that party political sloganit serves the Labour party's interest, but I cannot see how it serves his party's interest.

Norman Lamb: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention, but the simple fact is that there has been substantial increased investment in the NHS, which the Conservative party voted against. Whether or not part of that additional revenue was used for other means, it is still true that a substantial amount has gone into the NHS. We supported that and the Conservatives did not.

Stephen Dorrell: With great respect, the constant reassertion of something that is untrue does not make it true. It is absolutely right that we voted against the national insurance increase, but it is not true to say that we voted against increases in NHS expenditure. At the time, we made it crystal clear that we supported the increase in national health service expenditure.

Norman Lamb: The right hon. Gentleman has made his point, but the record speaks for itself.

Daniel Kawczynski: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Norman Lamb: No, I will not give way on that point.
	I now turn my attention to the Labour party, and the question of whether everything is the Secretary of State's fault. She has been left to take the flak for a decade of missed opportunity, inconsistent policy and botched reform. The chickens have come home to roost, and it is on her watch that we are experiencing the effects of so much mismanagement over the past decade. Let us consider the record and the roles of previous Secretaries of State.
	In 1997, the Labour manifesto specifically said that the Government would scrap the internal market; that was the commitment made, but there is now an internal market. There is a purchaser-provider split, and hospitals compete for patients. That flip-flop in policy direction is the responsibility of the Labour Government as a whole, not just the Secretary of State. As for the other institutional reforms that have taken place, there was the introduction of primary care groups, then the creation of primary care trusts, the scrapping of health authorities, the creation of strategic health authorities, and the merger of primary care trusts. There has been endless organisational change, and it has not all been in a consistent direction; there has been a flip-flopping from one approach to another at great cost, and with an enormous impact on the morale of the people working in the health service, including the doctors and nurses.

Andrew Stunell: Is my hon. Friend aware that health workers in my area were employed by three different trusts in three consecutive years? Despite all the contract rewriting costs and management change costs that went with that, their job did not change one little bit; it was all wasted investment.

Norman Lamb: I am very much aware of that. Every time there is a change of organisation, another group of people get early retirement packages and redundancy packages. The impact on morale is intense. Changes have just taken place in Norfolk, and I know lots of people who are still in temporary posts and are waiting to have new posts allocated to them. Change always affects morale, and because the changes have been so frequent the impact on the morale of patients, doctors, nurses and many other health professionals has been dramatic.
	Botched reform has also hit the voice of the patient and the public in the NHS. The right hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn) was responsible for abolishing community health councils when he was Secretary of State. I have since heard it said that he had a particularly bad relationship with his local community health council. CHCs were abolished in 2002, and patient and public involvement forums were established after that, in 2003. Three years later, they were abolished, and the local involvement in health networks were created. That was another mess, and a botched reform that left all those involved with a sense of total frustration, including people who, as volunteers, were trying to make a contribution to improving our health service.
	That same Secretary of State left another legacy: the current state of NHS IT. The hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller) got very hot under the collar on that point, but it is as though he is living in a parallel universe, and is not aware of what doctors in the NHS are saying about connecting for health. Their view is very different from the rosy picture that he described. When a political commitment was made to connecting for health, no proper analysis was undertaken of the need for the system, or of whether financial benefits would outweigh the costs. That is the view of the Public Accounts Committee, and the majority of its members are from the Labour party. It took the view that there was no proper analysis.
	The original budget was 2.3 billion, which will be exceeded. The PAC reckons that the costs range anywhere between 6.2 billion and 20 billion, compared with the original estimate of 2.3 billion. The project is therefore massively over budget and it is behind schedule, too. The PAC says that the highly controversial patient clinical records scheme is running two years behind schedule, with no indication of when that part of the project will be complete. If one talks to any group of doctors, whether they are GPs or hospital doctors, one is met by a chorus of groansthey are completely frustrated by connecting for health and the way in which it has been imposed from the centre. Again, that has impacted on morale.

Andrew Miller: May I commend to the hon. Gentleman a recent article in the  British Medical Journal, which reported progress

Andrew Murrison: It says here.

Andrew Miller: Yes, that is what it says in my notes. The article reports progress so far on the national programme, and it includes interviews with 25 senior managers and clinicians in four hospitals. May I point out to the hon. Gentleman that, contrary to what the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) said, there are 4,594 live sites providing the electronic prescription service, which is a huge improvement? I accept that it is a complex programme and that there are frustrations, but it is an immensely successfully development. There is now 100 per cent. coverage by PACSpicture archiving and communications systemsin London.

Norman Lamb: I am grateful that the hon. Gentleman at least acknowledged that there have been frustrations. I repeat that if one talks to any group of doctors, they are enormously frustrated with the system and the way in which it has been imposed centrally. When I hear that there has never been a thorough system review to ensure that the people who are building it, the people who will use it, and the people who will purchase it share a common view, I am completely amazed. People involved in the project on the private sector side have complained that there has never been a thorough system review.

John Bercow: The hon. Gentleman has just highlighted an unwelcome imposition from the centre, and it would be fair to say that heand there are such people in all parties in the Housesubscribes to the doctrine of localism. May I, however, in all honesty, put it to him and to the Secretary of State that when we talk about services that will be provided to, and are needed by, only a small minority of people with very severe and sometimes complex needs, there is frequently a compelling case for a central pot of money, and even some central direction; otherwise, the vulnerable people to whom I referred earlier may simply fall through the net? That has happened under successive Governments, so does the hon. Gentleman agree that the review of specialised commissioning, although welcome, could perhaps have gone further and that the Secretary of State might usefully be persuaded to take another look at it?

Norman Lamb: That is a very opportune intervention and I entirely accept the point made by the hon. Gentleman. In any system that tries to decentralise control and accountability there should be a role for the centre, too. It is a national health service, after all, and those specialist areas are particularly important to ensure that there is coverage across the country. I therefore accept his point entirely.

Andrew Miller: May I follow up that point? The hon. Gentleman, who lives in Norfolk, will accept that if he were run over by the proverbial 73 bus tonight, in an ideal system the first responder would have access to his medical records, thus enabling instant blood matching. There are good clinical reasons for centralism. Of course, there is a dichotomy, but he will accept that in a well developed system that is the kind of progress that we would like to see.

Norman Lamb: I am told by doctors in accident and emergency departments that they follow protocols in those circumstances. If necessary, my notes could be e-mailed from another part of the country.
	In 2000, we had the NHS plan, part of which was to create 100 new hospitals by 2010. That was a very ambitious programme, but it was to be funded using PFIa massive, uncosted commitment that will drain the NHS of resources long into the future. It is mortgaging our future and putting the NHS in a straitjacket of serviced accommodation. At the very time when Ministers are telling us that we must be flexible, that we must adapt to changing methods of delivering health care, and that we must shift care away from acute hospitals to care for people closer to home, we are stuck with the centralised provision of highly expensive serviced accommodation.

Simon Burns: Thanks to the help of the Prime Minister, the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), and others, my constituency is benefiting from a 143 million investment in new facilities and new build at Broomfield hospital. If the hon. Gentleman had been Secretary of State, would he have allowed that scheme to go aheadyes or no?

Norman Lamb: My point is simply that we have relied entirely on PFI. The National Audit Office and the hon. Gentleman's own party

Simon Burns: Answer the question.

Norman Lamb: I am not in a position to answer a question about one local hospital. Does the hon. Gentleman disagree with his own Front Benchers, who have also drawn attention to the cost of PFI? He seems to be in something of a muddle.

Simon Burns: rose

Norman Lamb: I will not give way again on that point.
	Spending on PFI schemes is projected to be 17.8 billion by 2014-15. It has not been costed, yet it is imposing an enormous burden on local health economies.

Ian Austin: The hon. Gentleman is wrong to say that all the new hospitals have been funded through PFI, but I am pleased to say that Russells Hall, the brand new 200 million hospital in Dudley, has been. Is his message to the people of Dudley, who will read whatever he says with great interest when we put it in our leaflet, that the Liberal party is against that investment and would not have supported the development of a brand new hospital, funded through PFI, for my constituents?

Norman Lamb: We have consistently supported the Government on increased investment in the health service, but the over-reliance on PFI has been a mistake. The hon. Gentleman might want to listen to the comments of Bob Ricketts, the head of capacity development at the Department of Health. In June 2005, he said:
	I have seen some awfully grand PFI schemes that are starting to give us a real problem in our capacity management. We need a fundamental rethink about how we invest in capital rather than human resources.
	The Government's own Department of Health is questioning the over-reliance on PFI. That over-reliance is the responsibility of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the next Prime Minister, who has at every stage driven PFI in the health service.

Andy Burnham: The hon. Gentleman may be aware that there has been a lot of controversy about Leeds children's hospital, which is a proposed PFI development, and that one of his colleagues, the hon. Member for Leeds, North-West (Greg Mulholland), has been pushing hard for it to be built. Under a Liberal Democrat Government, would the hon. Gentleman have to disappoint his colleague by abandoning that scheme?

Norman Lamb: That is a ludicrous suggestion. We oppose over-reliance on PFI, as do the Conservatives. We entirely support the building of that new hospital, but investment in health facilities does not always have to be done using PFIthat is a remarkable argument. Other finance mechanisms can be used.

Andrew Lansley: Does the hon. Gentleman recall that, at the last general election, the Conservative party issued a document about what we would do in Government? It included making resources available from the Department of Health capital budget to support several new children's hospitals, one of which would have been the Leeds hospital.

Norman Lamb: The hon. Gentleman makes the point that there are other ways of financing new build. Health bonds are another method. To suggest that it is PFI or nothing is ludicrous. The hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) often criticises PFI plenty of Labour Members criticise the over-reliance on PFI. Not only Liberal Democrats take that view.

Kevan Jones: As someone whose constituency is served by two brand new PFI hospitals, let me emphasise that they not only provide good quality health care, but they were built on time and on budget. How would the hon. Gentleman fund the hospital building programme that the Government have achieved?

Norman Lamb: It is remarkable that Labour contributors appear to have swallowed the idea that the only way in which one can invest in capital projects is through PFI. Bonds are a perfectly good way of raising funds for capital investment. It does not have to be done through PFI.
	We are in an extraordinary position whereby we have record investment in the NHS, yet there is also a record deficit. How did we get there? Too much investment has been wasted. The Health Committee drew attention to poor financial management, loss of financial control and the PFI obsession.
	The failings are the fault not only of the Secretary of State but of successive Ministers. Indeed, the pain of forcing trusts to address their deficits was delayed until after the last general election.
	Let us consider the legacy of another Secretary of Statethe current Home Secretary. His legacy includes the GP contract, which ran massively over budget and continues to have an impact on local health economies; the handover of responsibility for out-of-hours care from doctors to PCTs, which the Public Accounts Committee described as shambolic; and the consultants' contract, which also ran massively over budget and, according to the National Audit Office, fails to deliver the intended improvements in patient care. There is also his target for cutting MRSA infections, which will be missed by next year as C. difficile cases continue to increase. All those failures continue to afflict the NHS and the Government's reputation.
	Let us consider the current Secretary of State. She made a political commitment to sort out NHS finances, and the Government will undoubtedly hail the achievement of a small overall surplus as a victory at the end of the financial year, but at what price? Again, the Health Committee highlighted the impact on soft targets. Funding for voluntary organisations has been cut.

Eric Martlew: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Norman Lamb: No, I want to make some progress.
	Cuts have been made to mental health services in many parts of the country, including in my county of Norfolk. Public health initiatives have been cut.

Eric Martlew: Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

Norman Lamb: No, I shall not.
	Training budgets have been cut, with thousands of posts lost and newly qualified nurses unable to find work. Those are genuine cuts that affect patients and hit doctors' morale.

Eric Martlew: Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point, then?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) has indicated that he will not give way. I also remind the House that time is ticking away and many hon. Members are seeking to catch my eye. That should be borne in mind.

Norman Lamb: There is the threat to so many community hospitals around the country, including in my county of Norfolk. I fully accept that some reconfiguration of acute services is necessary, but in some cases it is driven by financial crisisagain, a point that the Health Committee made.
	The dentists' contract is also a shambles, with people finding it literally impossible in some parts of the country to find an NHS dentist. Primary care trusts throughout the country face deficits in their dental budgets because of the Government's miscalculation of patient fee income.
	We then come to junior doctors and the disgraceful shambles of the medical training application serviceMTAS. The judicial review has failed, and the Secretary of State has applied for costs in the case this afternoon against the junior doctors. I understand that the judge awarded costs but asked the Secretary of State to reflect on that. He made the point that she had acknowledged that mistakes had been made and that she will have to work with junior doctors. Would not it be outrageous if she chose to pursue her recovery of costs against the junior doctors who have been the victims of the Government's mismanagement of the system? I urge hershe is trying not to listento announce in her statement tomorrow that she will not pursue the recovery of costs against junior doctors. She could clear up the matter this afternoon, if she chose to do so.
	Despite all the warnings that the system had severe problems, the Government ploughed on regardless, displaying a mixture of arrogance and complacency. Clearly, MTAS was not adequately piloted or tested. The statement of Nicholas Greenfield from the Department of Health to the High Court last week revealed that it became clear in April that the software was not working. A paper on 25 April noted that the
	allocation algorithm was giving a different allocation from what was expected.
	Another paper to the project board on 26 April highlighted difficulties with the allocation principles. I quote:
	It stated that until the issues were resolved, and the principles agreed, it would not be possible to confirm the feasibility of the allocation rules, to design and develop the allocation software, or to confirm the timetable for making offers to applicants.
	By 28 April, the situation was even worse. A report by Beverley Bryant, in the aftermath of the security breaches, concluded that further changes to system functionality were necessary. It stated, however, that making further changes
	could further compromise the quality and security of the system which...could be fatal to the programme.
	In other words, the Government had no option. They had to decide not to proceed with MTAS. Why were we not told that on 1 May or in last week's statement? It was never mentioned.
	The Secretary of State has still not confirmed the number of extra training posts that will be available this summer to avert significant numbers of junior doctors being unemployed.

Andrew Stunell: One of my constituents, who is a consultant, drew to my attention last weekend the huge amount of consultant time being spent on trying to get the system back in order. He estimated that 140 hours of consultant time would be spent on the system and on trying to appoint junior doctors. That is a total waste of his effort, and reduces his capacity to give treatment to patients.

Norman Lamb: My hon. Friend makes a good point. The impact has been not just on junior doctors, but on all those who have had to conduct 15,000 extra interviews. There has therefore been an impact on patients, too. What a mess.
	A litany of misjudgments, costly mistakes, changes of direction and botched reform has been the responsibility not just of the Secretary of State but of the whole Government. That is an extraordinary record of failure from a Government who warned us back in 1997 that there were 24 hours to save the NHS. Everyone knows that the Secretary of State will go when the new Prime Minister takes over. Is it not ludicrous that the NHS must wait six weeks for that to happen? When so much needs to be done, we have a lame duck Secretary of State. She should go now.

Graham Stuart: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am not seeking to catch your eye in this debate, but it occurs to me that little time will be left once the Liberal Democrat Front-Bench spokesman has finished[Hon. Members: He has finished.] He has just finished. What can you do to ensure that Back Benchers who wish to contribute to such debates have time to do so?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: It is true that all three Front-Bench speeches have taken more than half an hour. That is a matter for those on the Front Benches. All I can do is urge hon. Members to make their contributions brief and, before they intervene, to think what they are intervening about and to make their interventions brief. But thenhope springs eternal.

Natascha Engel: I shall try and restrict myself to 10 minutes and take out all the digs at the Tory Front-Bench team, except to say that once again we are having a health debate on an Opposition day, in which I greatly enjoy taking part. I have taken part in almost all of them and I have yet to hear a Tory policy. Perhaps we will hear one later.
	The Department of Health is massive and wide ranging. I shall focus on cancer treatment and survival rates. Cancer affects almost every family and every person directly or indirectly. It is terrifying. Most doctors speak of the C-word rather than refer to cancer itself, because it used to be a death sentence. That is no longer necessarily the case. Although cancer is wide ranging and survival rates differ greatly, depending on the type of cancer, people are still twice as likely to survive if they are diagnosed today than they were 10 years ago.
	The reason that we have been so successful in cancer treatment and have such high survival rates is because of early screening, early diagnosis and far better treatment. Almost everyone with suspected cancer who is seen by their GP will be sent to a cancer specialist within two weeks, and 99 per cent. of patients who have been diagnosed with cancer will have had treatment within one month of their diagnosis. These are fantastic statistics.
	Part of the reason for such success is that the NHS has introduced far greater flexibility in the system for cancer treatment and takes account of the needs of individual patients far more. Treatment is carried out in communities wherever possible. Simple chemotherapy treatments can now be given in district hospitals such as the Chesterfield and North Derbyshire Royal hospital, which has developed a chemotherapy suite so that patients do not have to travel all the way to Sheffield if they do not want to. The Chesterfield Royal has been so successful in its chemotherapy treatment that it is massively expanding its operation. It is a tiny district hospital, but the same is happening throughout the country so that patients diagnosed with cancer can receive treatment in a much calmer community-based environment, with their families close by. That is a huge achievement.
	Eighty per cent. of women diagnosed with breast cancer will survive for at least five years, compared with 50 per cent. only 30 years agoagain, a massive achievement. Two thirds of women who are newly diagnosed with breast cancer are likely to survive for another 20 years. These sound like random statistics, but about 1,400 people who are alive today would not have been alive 10 years ago.
	One of those people is my mother, which is the reason I wanted to take part in the debate. She is over 60, and three years ago had a routine mammogram at the Addenbrooke's hospital. She lives in the neighbouring constituency of Huntingdon. The nurses were not entirely happy with the results, sent off for a biopsy on that day, and she was given a positive diagnosis there and then. She was seen and treated within three weeks of that routine appointment, which is staggering. On the day that she had her mammogram, she was given the name and telephone number for a nurse whom she could call day or night if she was worried. That was spectacular. Her experience has been fantastic. There are many other women like her throughout the country. Those cancer rates are fantastic.
	Another example concerns a friend of mine who lives in my constituency and who has taken a terrifying but very brave decision. Her family has been blighted by breast cancer. She has lost grandmothers, cousins and aunts to breast cancer. When her mother was 38, she decided that she would have preventive breast surgerya double mastectomyto avoid having to go through with the cancer. She was the first woman in the country to have such a preventive double mastectomy.
	Becky, a presenter of a breakfast radio programme on Peak 107 FM, decided at the age of 24 to become the youngest woman in the country to have a double mastectomyan incredibly brave decision for someone so young. She is beautiful and vivacious and has a very high profile in north-east Derbyshire. It is absolutely amazing. She had an 85 per cent. chance of developing breast cancer in her life. Taking the decision to have both breasts removed at such a young age was brave, but it was, for her, only a liberating experience. She has had breast surgery so she now has even better breasts than she had before. She is still enjoying life.
	The point is that modern technology and cosmetic surgery have meant that people like Becky can take blood tests and find out whether they are carrying a faulty gene, which was not possible before. A death sentence has been lifted from this girl and it is so easy to see it when we talk to her about her experiences.
	Those are two small examplesalbeit very close-to-home examplesof where breast cancer treatment and survival rates have made a huge difference, not just to my life but to the lives of other people. I hope that we can continue to make a difference. The best chance of continuing to be able to help people with cancer, especially breast cancer, is to maintain a Labour Government, as recent history shows.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I want to underline the point I made a few moments ago. Everyone can see the number of hon. Members seeking to catch my eye. We shall start the winding-up speeches at about 6.30 or 6.40 pm, so I would be grateful if hon. Members made their contributions as brief as possible in order to allow as many as possible to speak.

Grant Shapps: I shall try to adhere to your guidance, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
	If we are discussing the health service, it is important to acknowledge that extra money has been invested and some improvements made, particularly on waiting times. We then have to ask whether the money has been spent sensibly and whether we could get more from it by spending it more productively. One of the dangers of a debate like this is that we quickly descend into our own individual examples of exactly what is happening in our own local health economies and local hospitals. That sometimes misses the broader point, because it is always possible to find one example that proves or disproves a general rule, so I shall leave any comments about local matters until the end.
	Accountability within the health service is one of its great problems, despite the amount of money going into it. I suspect that we have all experienced the problem of taking an issue on behalf of a constituent to an acute health trust. It tells us that the matter is not its responsibility, but that of the commissioning agency, the primary care trust, which then says that it is a matter for the strategic health authority, now a regional body. The SHA proceeds to tell us that it is not a matter that it can deal with because the Secretary of State needs to intervene. At that point, we contact the Secretary of State for Health, who tells us that it is a matter for the local health economy[Hon. Members: Absolutely]so we have gone round in a huge circle. It is extremely difficult, in a system that almost deliberately seems to go out of its way to cause such confusion, ever to pin down exactly who is responsible or accountable for what is happening locally.

Meg Hillier: I will be brief. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman should visit constituencies like mine, where the Homerton hospital is a foundation trust made up of members of the public who have joined and created a mutual to help to run and hold the hospital to account. Does he not accept that that is a real achievementone that we should perhaps see more of?

Grant Shapps: I absolutely agree. We like the idea of foundation trusts and we want to go further and faster with them. We were going in that direction, until it was all reversed for the first half of the decade during which the Government were in powerbefore we realised the error of their ways.
	As I say, it is a problem of accountability. A great example is closing a chemotherapy unit on a temporary basis, when the entire community realises that it is actually being closed permanently. Chemotherapy is a treatment that people want to have close to home, if at all possible, for the simple reason that it is an uncomfortable experience. It is highly undesirable for people who are feeling sick to have to travel miles after their treatment.
	I have heard of cases of chemotherapy units being closed on a temporary basis in order to remove the need for the local NHS trust to consult the public on the closure. A temporary closure, unlike a permanent one, requires no consultation. Having temporarily closed the unit, the trust then consults on a permanent closure. The effect has been to close the chemotherapy unit permanently, while calling the closure temporary. The rules have been circumvented by pretending to have a consultation, even though the unit is already closed. That is just another example of the lack of accountability that has found its way, almost systematically, into the health service. The Secretary of State should address that issue.
	There are many other issues to address. Week in and week out in the House, we hear about a new top priority in the health service. Just the other week, I was highlighting the problems surrounding in vitro fertilisation in the NHS. In 2002, the then Secretary of State came to the House and said that everyone should be able to get at least one cycle of IVF on the national health service. I was very relieved to hear that. All three of my children were conceived through IVF, and the idea that others would be able to get the treatment through the NHS was to be welcomed.
	The trouble was that, after that had been happening for a while, it stopped. The reason for it stopping seemed to be that other priorities had come along and been piled on top of the original priorities set by the Secretary of State, resulting in the first priority being almost entirely lost. That applies to all manner of services. An investigation into audiology services revealed that, despite the 18-week target, the average wait is 42 weeks. In Liverpool, the wait for having a hearing aid refitted is five years

Andy Burnham: No it is not.

Grant Shapps: I can provide the Minister with the data

Andy Burnham: Prove it.

Grant Shapps: I will provide the data to the Minister. In fact, I have already provided them to the Secretary of State after I issued my report. If the Minister goes to www.shapps.com/reports, he will be able to download that report for himself.
	The truth is that there is a five-year wait for people trying to transfer from an old-fashioned analogue hearing aid to a digital one. The Government have recently said that their aim is to include audiology services in the 18-week target. That is fineit is to be welcomedbut there will be a problem if all that that does is pile that target on top of all the previous NHS targets. It is the latest priority in the latest week, and it simply will not work. The Government do not understand that the answer to all the problems in the NHS is not simply to stand up in the House and announce the latest priority, because all that happens is that the previous priorityand the one before, and the one before thatgets trampled on. That is how we end up with so little accountability.
	I want to be brief, so I shall simply do what I am sure all hon. Members want to do, which is to refer to a local case. Despite all the promises and pledges, and despite what we heard at Prime Minister's questions today and in the Secretary of State's opening comments about how wonderfully rosy everything should be in the NHS, we all have our own examples of how the exact opposite is the case. In my constituency, the Queen Elizabeth II hospital is the place that illustrates that problem.
	A consultation is about to get under way into the closure of the accident and emergency unit, of maternity services, of elderly care and of paediatrics, and into ending all elective operations there. This is the proposed wholesale closure of all the acute services at the hospital. The Secretary of State and her Ministers must recognise that when we hear pledges and promises, or talk of the number of extra doctors and nurses, they mean nothing to those who live in a county such as mine, which has more than 1 million people but only two hospitals that are set to remain after this flawed consultation: one in Labour Stevenage, the other in Labour Watford.

Eric Martlew: I was first elected a member of a health authority in 1974. In 1977, I was appointed chair of Cumbria health authority by a Labour Secretary of State, and in 1979 I was not reappointed by a Conservative Secretary of State. There was something honest about that. There were people chairing health authorities who supported the Government's views. Now, I am afraid that we have given that away. Now, the Healthcare Commission appoints retired civil servants. In my area it has just appointed a new primary care trust, not one of whose non-executive directors lives in a city or a town. They all live in a rural area, and I suspect that they all come from the middle class.
	I do not think we have done very well in that regard, but I will say this. Since 1974, I have worked in one way or anotherin the health authority or in Parliamentwith every Secretary of State we have had, and I believe that the record of the Secretary of State we have today compares with that of the best of them.

Graham Stuart: The hon. Gentleman is joking!

Eric Martlew: Certainly my right hon. Friend's record compares very well with that of the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell). I was a Member of Parliament during his time as Secretary of State.
	I think that the Secretary of State would agree that she has been greatly assisted by dedicated staff, and also by record funding from a Labour Government. As we have heard today, the NHS has been transformed. We have heard about the experience of patients, as opposed to that of politicians or the general public: we have heard that 90 per cent. are pleased with the treatment that they have received, which is excellent.
	We have slashed waiting times. Members who have been here for a while will remember when their postbags were full of letters and their surgeries were full of walking sticks, because people were waiting for hip replacements or elective surgery. They were not waiting for 18 weeks or for 18 months; some were waiting for two or three years. As Members know, that does not happen any more. The hon. Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr. Goodwill) is waving a piece of paper. I would like to think it was his resignation, but I suspect that it is not.
	Deaths from cancer and coronary disease have declined, but it would be wrong of me to waste this short opportunity by saying that everything in the garden is rosy. Sorry, Rosie! I mean, I apologise to the Minister of State, Department of Health, my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster, Central (Ms Winterton).
	Mistakes have been made. I happen to believe that the reorganisation of Cumbria PCT was wrong. It needed to be reorganised because it was ridiculous to have three PCTs for 40,000 people, but the creation of a unitary PCT for the whole of Cumbria was entirely wrong, because it has made the PCT too remote. I only hope that we do not make the same mistake in the local government reorganisation and end up with a unitary Cumbria.
	At first there was great concern about clinics run by community action teams, but when we met the Minister of State he gave us assurances that the CATs would be tailor-made for rural areas like Cumbria, and would not take resources away. I hope that in the near future it will be announced not only that CATs will be complementary to services in Cumbria, but that one will be based at Cumberland Infirmary.
	The out-of-hours service in my constituency is not satisfactory. We have an out-of-hours organisation called CueDoc, with a surgery at the top of the highest hill in Carlisle. As there is no public transport, I cannot imagine how the elderly and the sick manage to get there, especially in the middle of the night, but that could be altered.
	However, let us compare that with how things used to be. My area had the first private finance initiative hospital in the country. I advise Members never to want to be the first at anything, because being at the cutting edge has its problems. My hospital had its problems, but they are being sorted out. However, the fact is that we had waited 40 years for that new hospital. The Conservatives cancelled it on four occasions. The previous hospital had been built a long time agoduring the time of Lloyd Georgeand the maternity service was dangerous because the district general hospital was three miles away from the maternity hospital and the consultants could not get to the maternity hospital and children were dying. That has now all been sorted out.
	Finally, I shall talk about the dentistry service in Cumbria. In 2005, because of how NHS dentists felt about contracts, the vast majority of those in Carlisle opted out of the service. There were long queues in the streets of Carlislewhich was embarrassing and made the national newsas one dentist said that if people did not sign up immediately they would not get a dentist at all. Last week, it was revealed in  The Cumberland News that we have provided 23,000 places for patients in Carlisle, and that there was no waiting list for dentistry there. When the Ministermy right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster, Centralvisited and we went to a surgery, we came across people who had not been to a dentist for 10 or 15 years. Under the current Secretary of State, we have cured the problems of dentistry in north Cumbria, and they can be cured throughout the country.
	That is not all that should be said on this matter. A headline in today's  News and Star reads, Smile! New dentists will treat extra 7,000. That is not about my constituency; it is a story about the market town of Penrith, where there will also be no waiting list.
	It is wrong to say that the Secretary of State has failed. She has had a difficult task, but we are getting things right. One thing that we must do is ensure that the Conservatives never get another chance to decimate the NHS. They have never believed in itthey voted against itand they still do not believe in it. Many of them do not even use it, so why should we trust them with it?

Stephen Dorrell: First, I shall respond to the closing comments of the hon. Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew) by referring to what the Secretary of State said in her speech. She began by saying that being Secretary of State for Health is a great privilegeand she was generous enough to say that it was felt to be so not only by Labour Secretaries of State but by Conservative Secretaries of State as well. I did not agree with very much else of what she said, but I do agree that it is a great privilege to hold her office.
	However, when someone is granted a privilege it behoves them to ask what is expected of them in return. Given that this Secretary of State and her three Labour predecessors have been the beneficiaries of an unprecedented increase in national health service fundingincreases that the Conservatives supportwe can legitimately expect from her in return a commitment from the top of the national health service to deliver the best possible outcome for those increased resources. The charge that sticks against the Secretary of State is not that she is not committed to the national health service and its idealsof course she is committed to thembut that she has not delivered the level of competence that the taxpayers and patients of this country are entitled to expect in return for the investment provided by her colleagues in the Treasury.
	The Secretary of State responds to that charge by setting out all the improvements that have been delivered in the NHS over the past 10 years, and I do not dispute that there have been big improvements in some aspects of the service it delivers. Conservative politicians who say that the NHS has got worse since 1997 are simply wrong. That defies the evidence and the experience of those who use the health service. As my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State made clear, the charge against the Secretary of State is not that things have not got better. They have got better under this Secretary of State as they have under all her predecessors going back to 1948. There are endless statistics that my predecessors and I could quote on the improvements that were delivered by the NHS. Such improvements have been delivered throughout its history and my hon. Friend was good enough to cite some of the statistics on cancer mortality this afternoon.
	The charge against the Secretary of State is that, in the old words of the school report, she has been too easily satisfied with her own work. We criticise her for losing the opportunity to deliver even bigger benefits for the resources that have been provided to the NHS.

John Bercow: Given that the advances in medical science mean that whenever one devises a new cure, one effectively creates a new queue, does my right hon. Friend agree that uppermost in ministerial minds at all times should be the priority of increasing productivity in the NHS?

Stephen Dorrell: Yes, I do, as long as it is understood that we are looking for the maximum possible health gain for the resources that are provided to the NHS and, in particular, the delivery of the stated objectives that Ministers, under both Labour and Tory Governments, have set out for the NHS. I wish to focus on one of those objectives, because if we conduct the health debateas is often the temptationpurely in terms of the structure of health care delivered to particular communities, we miss the point of what the NHS exists for and what patients expect us to deliver through its structures.
	It has been said by every Health Secretary that one of the purposes of the NHS is to reduce health inequalities around the country. So one of the challenges for the Secretary of State is why, despite the huge increase in resources over the past 10 years, health inequalities in Britain have got worse. In my intervention in the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley), I said that we should look not only at the record on cancer mortality or infant mortality for this country now as compared with 10 years ago, but at the health outcome measures in comparison with other, comparable countries. We should challenge ourselves with the fact that although cancer mortality rates are better here now than they were 10 years, they are significantlynot merely statisticallyworse in Britain than in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The latter is possibly the most telling, because that country's national income is significantly lower than ours.
	We should not simply trade often meaningless party political anecdotes about health improvement, as we heard from the Secretary of State this afternoon: we should address the real consequences of the failure to use the resources supplied to hershe is now back in her placethat were not available to her predecessors.
	I shall not detain the House with the catalogue of mismanagement that has already been discussed, including the record on MTAS or the huge increases in resources for primary care that have somehow delivered a diminution in the quality of out-of-hours care. As for the Secretary of State's record on mixed-sex wards, I am tempted to say that that is a subject on which she may regard imitation as the sincerest form of flattery, because she has made the speeches about how dreadful they are, as I did, and her record is exactly the same as mine. Mixed-sex wards still exist in the health service, and there is no effective plan to remove them.
	The Secretary of State cannot conceivably be proud of the record on IT. In April, the Select Committee on Public Accounts published a report that stated:
	The...patient clinical record, which is central to obtaining the benefits of the programme, is already two years behind schedule.
	Most extraordinary of alljust listen to this, Mr. Deputy Speakerit added:
	The Department's investment appraisal of the Programme did not seek to demonstrate that its financial benefits outweighed its cost.
	What is an investment appraisal about, if not demonstrating that benefits exceed costs? It beggars belief that we can be launching a 12 billion programme on the basis of an investment appraisal that did not set out to compare costs with benefits and show that benefits exceeded costs.
	I promised to be brief. The charge against the Secretary of State is not that she does not care or that she is not committed, but that she has not delivered. That is the basis on which we Conservatives have used the device of this debate to demonstrate our belief that she should resign.

Ian Austin: I am delighted to speak in this debate, which gives us the opportunity to set out some of the dividing lines between the parties on the health service, to examine some of the choices that the British people will face at the next election and to consider the Government's record on some of the issues.
	The hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) said that he did not want to talk about his constituency, but I want to talk a little about mine because some of the things that we have seen in Dudley demonstrate well some of the wider improvements of the health service across the country. It is fair to say at the outset that none of the improvements in Dudley would have been possible without the leadership of the Secretary of State and her colleagues. That is why I am speaking against the Opposition motion today.
	Dudley primary care trust has undertaken wide-ranging reforms to services in the community in the past few years. As a result, my constituents now receive in their own homes personalised, individual care that would previously have been found only in hospitals. New ways of working introduced by this Government mean that care is tailored more than ever to meet the specific needs of the individual patient.
	There are new rapid-care teams, care staff working in the community with mental health patients and new nurse consultants working with those most likely to return to hospital most frequently. We are intervening earlier and working on ways of providing preventive care closer to home. When the impact of the work of those staff on just the first few patients was analysed, it showed that the length of their stays in hospital away from their families had been reduced by an average of one week. The most recent figures show that the strategy has slashed the average length of stay in hospital by almost a quarter.
	There are new case managers, who ensure that patients who can be treated at home are not unnecessarily admitted to hospital and that those who are admitted return home more quickly. Such managers cut emergency admissions. Again, it is worth referring to the figures: the work of one manager alone meant that 88 people could be treated at home, away from hospital, in one eight-month period.
	We are linking up health and social services in ways that could never have been dreamt of before. We are cutting out inefficiencies, speeding up treatment and reducing waiting times. Under the superb leadership of Rachel Harris at Dudley primary care trust, we have pioneered a new community heart failure team, which provides new services in health centres and clinics. As a result, emergency admissions caused by heart failure were reduced by 16 per cent. in the first year; a nearby PCT that did not then have a similar service saw its heart failure admissions increase by 10 per cent.
	As I said earlier, services at our district general hospital, Russells Hall, have also been transformed. We have a brand-new 200 million hospital, developed under the private finance initiative, with more doctors and nurses treating more patients more quickly than at any time in history.
	That is not to say that things are perfectthey never can be. We have problems with car parking, and infection rates always cause concern. Other issues of chiropody and audiology have been raised by constituents.
	The truth is that none of the improvements I spoke about earlier would have been possible without the extra investment that the Government have put into the NHS, which the Opposition voted against, despite what the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell) said earlier. Whatever they say about their new-found commitment to the NHS, we must not let anyone forget that they constantly opposed that extra investment and would cut spending on the health service if they had the chance to do so.
	Under the Labour Government, investment in the NHS has doubled and it will have trebled by 2008 to more than 90 billion. The NHS is receiving an extra 8 billion this yearthe biggest cash increase ever. All that investment means that there are about 280,000 more staff, as we heard earlier. There are more staff than at any period, with 35,000 more doctors, 80,000 more nurses

Lynda Waltho: And they are better paid.

Ian Austin: As my hon. Friend says, we have the best paid nurses in Europe.
	Furthermore, 116 hospitals have already been opened, or will be opened in the largest hospital building programme in our history, and 2,800 GP premises have been improved or refurbished.
	Whatever the words of the Conservative motion, the Leader of the Opposition said that the extra investment needed to deliver those changes was fiscal irresponsibility and he committed his party to a new fiscal rule that, whatever they claim, means that they would spend less on the NHS than we will.

Tim Loughton: That is not true.

Ian Austin: The hon. Gentleman may say it is not true, but his leader and the shadow Chancellor have promised to cut taxes every year under a Conservative Government through a so-called proceeds of growth rule. Their new third fiscal rule applied over the economic cycle would require spending cutsif enforced this yearof 21 billion.  [ Interruption. ] Opposition Members are chuntering away, saying that they disagree, but they do not need to take my word for it; the Leader of the Opposition admitted that implementing the rule would lead to dramatic cuts in public investment compared with Labour's plans. These are the right hon. Gentleman's wordsnot mine. He said that
	as that money comes in, let's share that between additional public spending and reductions in taxes. That is a dramatic difference. It would be dramatically different after five years of a Conservative Government.
	In the Budget, the Chancellor announced that spending on public services will be 61 billion higher by 2007-08 compared to 2004-05 and that total additional expenditure on the NHS in the coming year will be 10 billion higher than this yeara 10 per cent. increase. The Opposition refuse to match our spending plans.

Andrew Lansley: As we supported the spending plans of the current Labour Government at the last general election, and those plans take us through to the end of this financial year, what spending plans is the hon. Gentleman talking about?

Ian Austin: I am just a comprehensive schoolboy from Dudley, so the hon. Gentleman must forgive me if I cannot work things out, but as far as I can recall the Opposition voted against the national insurance increase that delivered extra expenditure for the health service. They voted against the increased expenditure for the health service that has been delivered and at the last election they did not promise to match us on the health service; they promised to take funds out of the health service to subsidise private care. They are not promising to match us [ Interruption. ] If the hon. Gentleman wants to intervene again to tell me that the shadow Chancellor has committed the Conservative party to matching us on health spending, I shall be delighted to hear it, because he has not done that.

Andrew Lansley: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. The Labour Government's spending plans run only to the end of this financial yearthat is, March 2008. We are indeed committed to matching those spending plans. If the hon. Gentleman has privy knowledge of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's plans beyond April 2009, we shall be happy to consider them.

Ian Austin: What I have knowledge of is the proceeds of growth rule, which commits the hon. Gentleman's party to spending less on public services than we would. He has not denied that the proceeds of growth rule would result in a Conservative Government spending less on public services than a Labour Government. As I said earlier, if that rule was introduced this year, it would mean that spending would be 21 billion lower than under the Government's plans. It would be lower still in every year after that. Let me put it another way: spending on the NHS accounts for almost a fifth of the Government's total managed expenditure, so cutting 21 billion from public spending would mean slashing 3.6 billion from the NHS. To achieve that, one would have to sack 100,000 nurses, 35,000 doctors and cut by a fifth the number of new hospitals, clinics and health centres.
	All the talk about a new compassionate Conservative party that is committed to the NHS is exposed as the old empty rhetoric masking the same old Tory party. The Conservatives might not give us the details about where the cuts would fall, but every speech makes it absolutely clear. What do they mean when they talk about cutting back the big state or cutting the fat from public expenditure? They might not give us the details about which services they would slash to pay for the tax cuts or which bits of the big state they want to trim back, but the fancy photo calls, the so-called rebranding, the hospital visits, the fact that the Leader of the Opposition spent time in a school in Hull, and lived with what the Opposition patronisingly referred to as an ordinary family in Birmingham for a week, cannot mask the truth that this is the same old Tory party, running down the NHS because it is committed to the same old spending cuts.
	The British people face a choice at the next election: record investment and reformed ways of working, transformed treatment, improved care and the aim of keeping patients at home and alive for longer under this party, or the same old Tory party with the same old package of cuts, charges, and privatisation.

Tim Loughton: That was another good debateat least until the last contributionand another health debate in Conservative time. There was an unprecedented show of strength by Cabinet colleagues in feigned support for the Secretary of State's valedictory performance, but we have to acknowledge the unprecedented scenes for which she is responsible. Thousands of doctors have taken to the streets to march against the Secretary of State and her policies. Thousands of Worthing residents, who are not known for taking to the streets, marched against the Government and the Secretary of State's policy on health. Not so long ago, the Public Gallery erupted in applause at the suggestion that the Secretary of State might like to apply for her own job under the circumstances that she was forcing on doctors under the medical training application serviceor at least she was until MTAS went pear-shaped.
	The Secretary of State wants us to mention patients and staff. Those marching patients and staff are testimony to what she has achieved. They speak volumes. She talks about a 90 per cent. satisfaction rate among NHS patients. Back in 1994, there was a similar survey, with similar criteria, and what was the satisfaction rate? Surprise, surpriseit was 90 per cent. She wants to talk about the attitude of staff. Let me just remind her of some of the comments made this morning by midwives at the Royal College of Midwives conference at which she spoke. Rosemary Exton from Nottingham has been a midwife for 24 years and in the last year has seen some real deterioration, including
	reduced opportunities for training and development, increased risk, markedly so, desperate resources, and increased stress.
	Midwife Liz Stephens from London said this morning to the Secretary of State:
	I have never felt as demoralised about maternity services in the whole of my 30 years as I do now.
	There is a rather long charge sheet behind the motion. I will give the Secretary of State the abridged version. When she was first appointed back in May 2005, she said:
	Over the next three months my priority is to spend time listening and learning from the real expertspatients and staff.
	So, what did she do? From July 2005 to June 2006 she did not visit a single hospital outside London. She did not visit any of the Sussex hospitalsall of which are now threatened with closure or downgrading. In July 2005, she proposed merging primary care trusts and strategic health authorities, and the divestment of PCT provider functions. By November, that had been abandoned and she was forced to apologise. There have been three attempts at reconfiguration: the regionalisation of SHAs, the merger of primary care trusts and the regionalisation of NHS ambulance trusts.
	The latest onslaught on the NHS locally is the reconfiguration that involves cuts masquerading as modernisation, as the Secretary of State knows. There are also the heat maps, and the 43 maternity units and the accident and emergency departments across all of Sussex and the rest of the country that are under threat on her watch. There is perpetual reorganisation, confusion and turmoil.
	In the right hon. Lady's first speech to the House as Secretary of State, she spoke of her aim
	to create a society based on fairness and social justice.[ Official Report, 24 May 2005; Vol. 434, c. 578.]
	Since then, according to the  Health Service  Journal, health inequalitiesthe difference between the life expectancies of the richest and pooresthave become greater than at any time since the Victorian era. Let us consider the deficits under this Secretary of State's watch. In 2005, she promised to reduce the overall deficit, yet the turnout was 1.31 billion of gross deficit, which was the worst in NHS history at that time. Hospital trusts have had their financial planning plunged into chaos due to the withdrawal of the tariff. A Healthcare Commission report showed that nearly a third of hospitals had failed to balance their books. Seven out of 10 chief executives said that the care of their patients would suffer as a result of short-term financial decisions, while, according to the  Health Service  Journal, two thirds of them were closing wards.
	Virtually no area of the NHS has been immune from the Secretary of State's incompetent meddling. The new dental contract has been described as a shambles by the head of the British Dental Association's general dental practice committee. Just last month, 85 per cent. of dentists said that they believed that the new contract had not improved access to NHS dentistry.

Andrew Miller: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Tim Loughton: I will not.
	We saw the shambles of the collapse of the home oxygen service in February 2006 under this Secretary of State's watch. There has been the mess of the GP out-of-hours serviceat least the hon. Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew) acknowledged that it had been a messwhich has cost 242 million more than the Government intended and led to a reduction in productivity. The targets to halve the number of MRSA infections have failed dismally, and now C. difficile, which kills twice as many people as MRSA, is endemic throughout the health service and growing at a faster rate than ever.
	Conservative Members' warnings of 20,000 job losses were derided by the Secretary of State, yet according to her work force planning department there will now be 37,000 job losses, which is 2.7 per cent. of the work force. There have been failures in public health on obesity, mental health, binge drinking and sexually transmitted diseases.

Jim Devine: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Tim Loughton: I will not.
	The independent advisory group on sexual health and HIV found that substantial parts of the 300 million that had been set aside to improve sexual health had been raided by PCTs to cover deficits and that the money reached the front line in only 30 out of 191 PCTs. The ticking time bombs that are being built up under this Secretary of State could create catastrophic conditions in the future. Most recently, we have seen figures showing that a fifth of hospitals have failed to eliminate mixed-sex wards. Disgracefully, in the mental health service, 55 per cent. of acute hospitals now have mixed-sex wards. We do not need to repeat the debacle over the medical training application service. We should not be surprised about all that because the Secretary of State has formshe showed it when she was Secretary of State for Trade and Industry.
	The Secretary of State has received a vote of no confidence from her own staff. An external survey for Whitehall showed that fewer than two out of 10 senior civil servants at the Department of Health believed that it was well managed, while only 4 per cent. thought that the Department was able to manage change well. If the right hon. Lady cannot successfully lead the 3,500 people in her Department, she cannot be trusted to lead the 1.4 million people working in the NHS.
	A recent survey in  Hospital Doctor showed that under this Secretary of State, 69 per cent. of doctors would not recommend a career in medicine. Some 56 per cent. of doctors believe that there have been no improvements in the NHS since 2002. According to an official survey by health service regulators, fewer than half of NHS staff would be happy to be a patient at their own hospital. What an indictment of the Secretary of State's policies over the past two years. A survey by  Health Service Journal found that among NHS chief executives, the right hon. Lady was the least popular Secretary of State for Health in the past decadeand she had some competition.
	The Secretary of State has no support in her Department, no support in the NHS and, apparently, no support from her Front-Bench colleagues. The chairman of the Labour party has protested against the closure of maternity services and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport has protested against the closure of 24-hour emergency clinics. The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), and the Chief Whip have protested against the closure of maternity services, as have the Minister for Local Government and the Health Secretary's departmental colleague, the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis). The Solicitor-General, Home Office and Work and Pensions Ministers, and Parliamentary Private Secretaries to Ministers at the Departments of Trade and Industry and of Health have all protested against the right hon. Lady's health policy, on her watch as Secretary of State for Health in this Government.
	The right hon. Lady has lost the confidence of her Department. She has lost the confidence of junior doctors and the next generation trying to train for a career in the NHS. She has lost the confidence of the RCN and nurses. She has lost the confidence of midwives. And she has lost the confidence of the patients she is here to serve.
	The right hon. Lady has taken the culture of Not me, guv to new heights. It is never her fault. In November 2006, she told the Health Committee that it was the fault of the NHS for employing too many staff. In March 2006, she blamed clinical resistance to change in the NHS for all the problems. Just last week, for MTAS she blamed the BMA, the royal colleges and the postgraduate deaneriesnever herselfand today we have seen her blame African Governments for her Government issuing 50,000 work permits for African nurses working in the NHS. It is never the fault of the Secretary of State for Health, never the fault of her Ministers and apparently never the fault of her Department.
	There has been a catalogue of departures by people around the Secretary of State. In March 2006, Sir Nigel Crisp departed, as did a Health Minister in the Commons and another in the Lords. Since June 2006, no fewer than six of the 14 board members at her Department have departed. Most recently, James Johnson, chairman of the BMA, fell on his sword after MTAS. Why? It is never the Secretary of State who takes responsibility.
	The NHS budget is larger than the GDP of 155 member nations of the UN and it needs skill and expertise to run it, yet under the right hon. Lady's leadership the central management of the NHS has rapidly come to resemble one of the less distinguished banana republics. The Home Secretary has just announced a 3.5 million bonus scheme for his Department, which he described as not fit for purposea perverse system that rewards failure. The Secretary of State should take the leaf out of her own policy of seeking to implement payment by results and to link elements of GP pay to patients' satisfactionbut I fear that if she took that route, she would end up a net contributor to the Exchequer, rather than taking the modest 1,000 reduction that our motion proposes.
	This Secretary of State has taken complacency, incompetence, fantasy and the art of the patronising to new heights. She has exploited the good will and hard work of staff in the NHS, whose dedication has been in spite of her, not because of her. Their loyalty and patience have been and are being severely tested. Reducing her salary by 1,000 is poor compensation for two years of mismanagement. She is past her sell-by date. It is time that she gave the NHS a break. It is time for her to go.

Andy Burnham: The first responsibility of any Secretary of State for Health is to NHS patients. As much as we have obviously been hanging on every word uttered by Opposition Members this afternoon, I hope that they will not be too offended if I say that we set a little more store by the views of real patients treated in real NHS hospitals in the past 12 months. That is the ultimate verdictthe one that counts and the one on which every Health Secretary should be judged. So what is their verdict?
	Let us start with the Leader of the Opposition's constituents: 94 per cent. said that the care that they got from their local trust last year was good, very good or excellent. The shadow Health Secretary's constituents were even more pleased: 95 per cent. of them said the same, with a full 43 per cent. saying that it was excellent. Just 1 per cent. said that the care they received was poor. The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) is developing such a talent for whinging about the NHS that it would not surprise me if that 1 per cent. was him. The Healthcare Commission's figures record an improvement in patient satisfaction on last year. Those are the facts. They tell me that under my right hon. Friend's leadership, patient care is getting better in the NHS.
	However, we are not so arrogant as to say that there are not real issues to be addressed in the health service. Many have been raised today. The hon. Member for North Norfolk and others talked about MTAS. We have acknowledged that there have been serious problems with the system and we have promised to learn the lessons from those problems. Interviews are taking place now, and I believe that today's ruling in the courts will allow us to map out a way forward. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will say more tomorrow, including on the issue of costs, which the hon. Member for North Norfolk mentioned. I hope that that will enable us to move the issue on.
	The hon. Gentleman made a big attack on private finance initiatives in his speech. He may correct me if I am wrong, but are not his constituents benefiting from a new PFI hospital, and is it not the case that PFI allows more areas to get their new hospital at once? Is it not a case of the hon. Gentleman saying, We've got ours; we're all right, and we'll cancel those other hospitals including the Leeds children's hospital, which he was asked about, although he could not answer the question?
	My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) made a powerful speech about the spectacular improvements in cancer care since the Government came to power. She was right to say that cancer affects every family in the country, including mine, which was affected by it only this year. One of the earliest targets that the Government set was on access to cancer services for people who have a suspected cancer. That is precisely the kind of target that the Opposition have been deriding and would remove. My hon. Friend was absolutely right to point to improvements in that regard.
	We next heard from the Tories' self-appointed campaigner-in-chief, the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps). He began his speech by saying that money had been invested, improvements had been made and waiting times were down. I have only one thing to say to him: I thank him very much for his support this afternoon.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew) made important points about the NHS appointments process. He said that experience of politics and public life should not bar people from appointments, and I do not think that he will find any disagreement from Labour Members. He also said that services should be provided locally, and of course we agree with him on that, too. I can understand his frustration about the primary care trust changes, but they resulted in partnerships being more coterminous with local government, and that allows us to strengthen those partnerships across the country. On the issue of community action teams, he will know that a Cumbria-wide review is in preparation. The question of CAT services will be addressed as part of that review, which will be published in a few weeks' time.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley, North (Mr. Austin) tied the shadow Health Secretary up in knots on the issue of health funding. It was a pleasure to watch, and the shadow Health Secretary completely failed to address my hon. Friend's points. The shadow Health Secretary said that the Tories had committed to the spending plan and would have invested the same amount as the Government did, but he conveniently forgot about the patient passport idea proposed by the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron). Had he forgotten about that?

Andrew Lansley: indicated dissent.

Andy Burnham: The hon. Gentleman shakes his head; I think that he had forgotten. I am afraid that that idea would have taken money out of our national health service.
	Next, we heard from the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell), who delivered a pious lecture, but a touch more humility might have been in order from that former Secretary of State for Health, because I have been reading his reviews from the time when he was Health Secretary. Let me read the headlines from his dying days in office: in January 1997, the  Daily Mirror had the headlines 400 kids turned away from intensive care, and two and a half days on a casualty department trolley. A third headline said, You're off your trolley, MinisterNHS is in a critical condition. Those were the comments made when the right hon. Gentleman was Health Secretary. Those were the reviews, and these are the facts: when he left office, 286,000 people had been waiting more than six months for NHS treatment and there was a large NHS deficit that was 1.5 per cent. of the total NHS budget. That is significantly larger than any deficit today. As I say, a touch more humility may have been in order.
	The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire came here to throw stones, but let us take a little look at his performance. He will remember that I told the House a few weeks ago that an NHS trust had accused him of scaremongering when he said that its local accident and emergency department was to close. In fact, no such thing was true. Last week, he went further and put his name to a pitiful press release that claimed that official Department of Health guidance could lead to half of all accident and emergency departments being axed. Let me be absolutely clear: there is no such official Department of Health guidance. That announcement was about as well worked-out as the one that came out the same daythat great Tory triumphon grammar schools. It was good of the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire to rush that rubbish out last Thursday to help the leader of his party out of a hole, but does he now accept that that embarrassing piece of tripe does not have any basis in fact whatsoever, so will he withdraw it? If you remember, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that is all part of the positive Tory NHS yes campaign which, in fact, is a nasty, negative campaign designed to scare the public and demoralise NHS staff.

Andrew Lansley: The Secretary of State confirmed earlier that she agrees with Sir George Alberti, as her aim is that accident and emergency departments across the country should have a catchment population of 450,000, with the implication that 92 A and E departments will close.

Andy Burnham: If the hon. Gentleman had been listening, he would know that my right hon. Friend had said that it was for specialist care. I repeat that there is no official Department of Health guidance on the matter.
	How does the Labour Secretary of State's record compare with the record of Opposition Members? On my right hon. Friend's watch, waiting lists have fallen to their lowest ever levelnot just a low level, but the lowest ever level. Just 352 people have been waiting for more than six months, and the figures are falling further still in every English constituency represented in the House. She has had the political courage to take hard decisions to put the NHS back in financial balance, and it is on that platform that she laid out plans to invest an extra 8 billion in the NHS this year. She is the first Secretary of State since the early 1990s to see MRSA rates fall after the inexorable rise that began under the previous Government, and that is something on which we want more progress. She has presided over continuing falls in death rates from cancer and coronary heart disease, thus saving lives up and down the country. Moreover, there has been no winter crisis on her watch.
	I must tell the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire that the House fell about when, in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris), who asked why there had not been a winter crisis since 1999, he said, Luck. I thought for one horrible moment that he was going to say global warming, but he did not. Let us look at my right hon. Friend's achievements. We have the lowest ever waiting lists. Is that luck? No, it is not. We have the best cancer care that the country has ever seen. Is that luck? I do not think so. We have the best health care system in the English-speaking world, as judged by the Commonwealth Fund in a report this week. Is that luck? I do not think so. It is a record of which she can be proud. Waiting lists, infection rates, death rates from cancer and coronary heart diseasethose are things that matter to the people who put us into office. They are the things on which every Secretary of State should be judged. It is a record of which she can be proud, and it is a record of which the Labour Government are proud. I urge the whole House to send those cocky Tories packing tonight.
	 Question put, That the original words stand part of the Question:
	 The House proceeded to a Division.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I ask the Serjeant at Arms to investigate the delays in the Lobbies, starting with the Aye Lobby.

The House having divided: Ayes 219, Noes 282.

Question accordingly negatived.
	 Question, That the proposed words be there added,  put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments):
	 The House divided: Ayes 269, Noes 207.

Question accordingly agreed to.
	mr. deputy speaker  forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House believes that there is no need to reduce the salary of the Secretary of State for Health at a time when patient satisfaction is increasing, with nine out of ten in-patients saying their care has been good, very good or excellent, waiting times are at their lowest since records began, an extra 200,000 lives have been saved from heart disease and cancer since 1996 and investment in the NHS is being trebled by 2008.

PETITIONS

Seal hunting (Canada)

Eric Martlew: I rise to present the petition of the International Fund for Animal Welfare and concerned members of the public regarding Canada's commercial seal hunt. The petition is signed by Brenda King and more than 46,000 other UK citizens, and should be seen in the context of the further 144,000 postcards, text messages and letters presented to the Minister for Trade today, of another non-parliamentary petition by IFAW of 83,000 signatures, and of the more than 31,000 signatures on this matter presented last year by my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Judy Mallaber) on behalf of Respect for Animals.
	The petition declares:
	That the commercial seal hunt in Canada is unacceptably cruel and notes that all veterinary reports document this. The petitioners are concerned that over 1 million seals were killed in Canada alone between 2003 and 2005; and are further concerned that the UK provides a market for unnecessary seal products.
	The petitioners therefore request the House of Commons to pass legislation to ban the trade in all harp and hooded seal products in the UK as a matter of urgency.
	And the petitioners remain, etc.
	 To lie upon the Table.

Orchard Park Shopping Centre

Diana Johnson: I should like to present a petition from my constituents in the Orchard Park and Greenwood ward in Hull, North, including the lead petitioner, Doreen Gritt, who are fighting for a better shopping centre in their local community. Several of the shops in the area are currently derelict, vandalised or contain very little stock.
	The petition declares:
	To the House of Commons, the Petition of the Residents of the Orchard Park Housing Estate, Kingston upon Hull, declares that the Orchard Park Shopping Centre is in need of redevelopment. The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Secretary of State for Local Government and Communities to ensure that a redevelopment or refurbishment of the Centre takes place.
	And the petitioners remain, etc.
	 To lie upon the Table.

DENTISTRY (VCJD)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn. [Mr. Alan Campbell.]

Paul Beresford: I am delighted to have this opportunity to raise this rather complex and minor issue, except in the minds of dentists. That leads me to declare an interest: I am a very, very part-time dentist, but I take a considerable interest in endodontics. The reason for the debate is the letter sent by the chief dental officer for England last month to every dentist in England. I believe that a similar letter has gone out in the other countries of the United Kingdom. The letter stated that its intention was to
	clarify the situation with regard to decontamination and reuse of instruments, especially those used in endodontic treatment.
	That covers an area quite a lot broader than might at first appear.
	Advice was given in the letter on having high standards of decontamination, which is good, logical and appropriate. A new point was introduced, however, which stated that
	endodontic reamers and files are to be treated as single use.
	The advice was intended to stop the transmission of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from carriers to non-carriers during endodontic treatment. To my surprise, it received a lot of coverage in the national mediait must have been a quiet day. As patients tend to scare easily, especially in relation to dentistry, a little reassurance might help.
	Variant CJD is an exceptionally rare but fatal human disease of the brain and nervous system. It was first discovered in 1996 and is considered to have originated in humans through the consumption of cattle infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy. By mid-2006, 265 people in the UK had either definitely or probably died from the disease. Iatrogenic transmission is considered to be a remote possibility via the prion protein on surgicalespecially stainless steelinstruments. To add to the scare factor, I understand that in the last financial year more than 900,000 root treatments were conducted through the national health service in England alone.
	As well as looking at a number of papers dealing with the subject, I discussed the situation with Professor Hugh Pennington, a renowned expert in the field. He pointed out to me, reassuringly, that occurrences of the condition appeared to be diminishing, and said that, at a guess, there were perhaps 200 carriers in the United Kingdom out of a population of 60 million. The chances of being preceded into the dental surgery by one of those 200 are therefore fairly remote.
	Professor Pennington made further reassuring points. He said there was no convincing evidence that vCJD had been iatrogenically transmitted to humans by surgical instruments. He thought that surgery was under some suspicion, but that that applied only to surgery on the central nervous system. Moreover, there was no evidence of iatrogenic transmission through dentistry at any time in the United Kingdom or, indeed, the world.
	As the Minister will know, the chief dental officer was concerned about the result of research involving mice and transmission from stainless steel endodontic instruments. That research prompted concern that the protein could be difficult to remove from stainless steel endodontic reamers and files, and hence could be iatrogenically transferred from one mouse to another. Professor Pennington considered that the normal dental wire brush cleaning, followed by autoclaving, would dramatically reduce the already tiny risk to any dental patient. However, the chief dental officer, acting on the precautionary principle, issued a warning.
	As the Minister probably knows, endodonticstooth root filling or, in layman's terms, taking out the nerveare used as a means of preserving a tooth in its place in the jaw when it is dead or dying, or as a means of retaining or restoring a badly broken-down tooth. If the Minister does not follow that, the Chancellor will be able to explain, according to recent reports in the newspapers. The dentist locates the so-called nerve or pulp through the occlusal surface of the tooth using instruments such as diamond or tungsten carbide burs, often followed by stainless steel burs to locate the main pulp chamber. Further instruments, especially in the case of premolars and molars, are frequently used for location and opening of root canals.
	Locating of the openings of the canals may be difficult and may involve specialist instruments, particularly endodontic Piezo ultrasound diamond and nickel titanium instruments. Traditionally, the cleaning of the canals is undertaken with stainless steel endodontic reamers and files. More recently, the profession has moved to the use of much improved rotary nickel titanium reamers. The manufacturers suggest that they should be used on up to 10 root canalswhich is just as well, as they are expensive. The advised limit is intended to reduce the risk of file separation in the canal. The alternative treatment of teeth clinically requiring root canal treatment because of disease is, of course, extraction.
	Interestingly, a report in the  British Dental Journal at the end of last month about a research programme on dental treatment and the risk of vCJD, involving examination of patients carrying the disease, concluded
	We did not find a statistically significant excess of vCJD associated with dental treatments with the exception of extractions.
	Most instruments used for extractions are stainless steel. Incidentally, so are most dental instruments, all of which at some time or other will be contaminated with blood and potentially, in some cases of dental surgery or scaling, with oral tissue.
	To give the Department of Health its due, I understand that it has been funding a research programme seeking a new method of prion decontamination. Last weekthe timing was brilliantthe research produced, through a collaboration between D-Gen  DuPont, a new prion disinfectant called Rely+On Prion Inactivator. Only DuPont could have come up with a name like that.
	All those issues raise a number of questions. First, in the research on mice, was hypochlorite used, as in normal human etidodontics, as a lubricant and remover of protein tissue from instruments? Secondly, bearing in mind that stainless steel instruments are increasingly being replaced with nickel titanium, does the research on mice indicate that they as hard to clean of protein tissue as stainless steel? Thirdly, has use of the new prion inactivator been taken into account in the decision, or can it be now? Fourthly, in view of other research, why have endodontic files been specifically selected when many other surgical instruments, including other endodontic instruments, could technically be just as vulnerable?
	Fifthly, as national health service dentists keep asking, who will pay? Stainless steel reamers cost probably less than 10 a pack. The cost of nickel titanium kits varies between 35 and 60 a kit. We must also consider endodontic instruments that enter and touch vital pulp tissue. A dentist who frequently searches for root canals might use one, two or three ultrasonic cutters in doing so, and they cost between 70 and 85 each. Endo-access kitsto use the dental slangwhich have stainless steel burs as well as tungsten carbide ones and which frequently hit the pulp because they have to go through to find the chamber, cost 40.
	Finally, as Professor Pennington agreed, the risks are infinitesimal. There are very few carriers. Sterilization techniques massively reduce what is already a very tiny risk to virtually no risk, especially if the new prion inactivator is used. Hence questions have to be asked about risk assessment and whether proportionality should be applied to the precautionary principle. In essence what I am asking is, can we have another think?

Rosie Winterton: I congratulate the hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) on securing the debate, and I pay tribute to all the dentists for their co-operation in implementing what is an important measure as part of the Government's precautionary actions to ensure the reduction of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease infection risks. The hon. Gentleman asked a number of questions on the research, and I hope he will accept that I do not know all the answers, but I would be happy to write to him with details on the procedures used in identifying the risk and other matters.
	I can assure the hon. Gentleman that in April the chief dental officer and colleagues in devolved Administrations looked carefully into what action needed to be taken. That was informed by the preliminary findings of research that was in progress at the Health Protection Agency, and it was also based on precautionary advice from the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee, which provides the Government with independent expert scientific advice on such matters as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, CJD and scrapie.
	SEAC issued its position statement on dentistry and endodontic treatment in May 2006. At that point, it concluded that it was unclear whether vCJD infectivity could be transmitted via endodontic files and reamers, but that given the plausibility of such a scenario and the large number of endodontic procedures undertaken annually, it would be prudent to consider restricting these instruments to single use as a precautionary measure. In addition, previous Department of Health advice on minimising the risk of vCJD transmission that was published in 1999 stated that where instruments are difficult to clean, consideration should be given to replacing them with single-use instruments. Owing to the difficulty in decontaminating endodontic files and reamers, making those instruments single use would eliminate any potential risk. A number of dentists were already using single-use instruments for that reason.
	The SEAC position statement in May 2006 also noted that there were uncertainties in respect of the scientific data and the assumptions underpinning the assessment of risk. The committee therefore recommended:
	Once the research is complete and/or other data become available, the risks should be reassessed.

Paul Beresford: What concerns dentists is that although stainless steel endodontic instruments have been specifically picked out, other endodontic instruments are involved and once one goes to single use of those the cost goes through the roof.

Rosie Winterton: I shall say more about costs and further work later.
	The Department has now received some early findings from the Health Protection Agency from research on mice, which is still in progress. I will write to the hon. Gentleman with some of the details that he requested. The early findings suggest that infectivity can be found in several dental tissues and support the possibility that endodontic files and reamers could pose an effective route for transmission of vCJD. Therefore, the findings at this stage support SEAC's view that these instruments should be restricted to single use on a precautionary basis in order to reduce any potential risk of transmission.
	After we had obtained the advice from the HPA, we considered that it would be prudent to act immediately on SEAC's precautionary advice to make endodontic files and reamers single use. That decision was supported by both the HPA and SEAC. The studies are ongoing and I will give the hon. Gentleman as much information as I can, but I have to say that some of the studies will be subject to peer review before publication. I am sure that he will appreciate the need for that added check.
	The hon. Gentleman mentioned some of the concerns about cost implications for those dentists who were not already using single-use instruments. That is a complex area and one that we could not address fully when the announcement was made. The paramount concern at that point was to act swiftly and responsibly in terms of safeguarding public health. However, we have now analysed the cost implications in more detail and we will issue advice to primary care trusts this week on how to recognise some of those additional costs.
	I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will accept that the data show that the incidence of root canal treatments is variable. Our figures show that a typical dentist carries out only about 25 root canal treatments a year. For those dentists, the additional costs, which I will detail later, will be marginal and could well be offset by other expenses moving in the opposite direction. We have to be clear about how to approach the issue of expenses that are paid to dentists. We cannot make adjustments every time for different costs that might occur for one instrument as opposed to another. It would be difficult to do that on a yearly basis, so there will be swings and roundabouts in the costs.
	However, a minority of dentists carry out more treatments. About 10 per cent. of dentists carry out an average of 180 treatments a year. Even for those dentists, it is important not to exaggerate the additional costs. As the hon. Gentleman suggested, some of the cost estimates have tended to focus on the use of the more expensive nickel titanium instruments, but the evidence from suppliers is that stainless steel instruments make up some 70 to 80 per cent. of the market. Many cost estimates have also ignored the extent to which the previous multi-use instruments had to be replaced; and, importantly, following the announcement dental suppliers have responded swiftly by making single-use instruments available at much lower prices than before.
	The Department of Health is also working with NHS Supply Chainan NHS-based purchasing initiativeto enable NHS dentists to take advantage of the significant buying power of the NHS, which should also result in lower expenses across the board. Information from dental suppliers indicates that dentists have responded in a very professional manner to the announcement and are now ordering sufficient quantity of these instruments to enable them to be treated as single use.
	Taking all those factors into account, our best estimate is that practitioners undertaking 25 treatments a year are likely to incur additional costs of about 80 on average per year. Practitioners undertaking 180 treatments a year will, we think, incur additional costs of about 1,000 per year. As I said, this week we will issue PCTs with advice that will recognise that the NHS needs to make arrangements to discuss those higher costs with contract holders.

Paul Beresford: The key point is where we draw the line on what an endodontic instrument is. If we restrict the definition to reamers and files, the figures seem right. However, if we include other instruments involved in endodontics, including those that touch the potentially infected pulp, the prices are much higher.

Rosie Winterton: We are preparing an expert risk assessment, involving those in dentistry decontamination and public health, on the potential risks associated with a range of different procedures. However, until that work is completed it will not be possible to be specific about what other measures we may need to consider. However, I have taken on board the hon. Gentleman's points, and it is important that we conduct that slightly wider risk assessment.
	In conclusion, our primary concern in making the announcement was always to safeguard the health of patients undergoing treatment and to reassure patients that we would continue to place their safety at the heart of services commissioned by the NHS. As I said, we are now also working to ensure not only that we consider any further risks, but that there is a fair recognition of any significant additional costs faced by the profession.
	As I said, I shall be happy to write to the hon. Gentleman about some of his more detailed questions on how the risk assessment was carried out.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Adjourned accordingly at thirteen minutes to Eight o'clock.